Paste the email you actually send. Get it scored against 6.2 million sourcing sequences sent in 2025, with the specific things costing you replies and what to change. Nothing leaves your browser. No sign-up.
11 words.
Open rates are highest at 2 to 5 words, and drop for six or more.
Cut it to five words or fewer.
No personalisation tokens in the subject.
Company, first name and title together open at 71.5%, against 61.1% with none. That is a 10.4 point lift.
Add the missing tokens. This is the highest-impact change available.
138 words.
Enterprise candidates reply best to emails under 150 words, and the rate falls from 23.7% at 100 words to 2.8% at 500. Smaller companies see far less variation by length.
Cut to 100 words or fewer. The optimum moved down from 101 to 150 words in 2024.
No tokens found in the body.
Personalisation is the strongest single lever Gem measured, and the same tokens work in the body.
Reference something specific: their company, their title, or the work itself.
1 email, reaching about 8.8% cumulative reply.
One email reaches 8.8%, two 13.7% and three 16.3%. Gem finds four is the practical optimum.
Add follow-ups. The second email is the single biggest gain in the whole sequence.
Reply rates fell by a quarter during 2025. A message that worked last year is not clearing the same bar now, which is why the length and personalisation checks above matter more than they used to.
6.2 million email sequences and 15.5 million messages sent through Gem in calendar 2025.
Gem's chart labels 3 words as best, while its own body text says the optimal length is 2 words. The report does not reconcile the two, so treat anything from 2 to 5 words as the supported range rather than trusting one number.
Cumulative reply rate by sequence stage: 1 email 8.8%, 2 emails 13.7%, 3 emails 16.3%.
Source: Gem, Email outreach for recruiters: 2026 benchmarks and best practicesRecruiting outreach got measurably harder during 2025. Across 6.2 million sequences, average reply rates fell from 22.6% to 16.9%, and the share of replies showing genuine interest fell with them. A template written two years ago is not clearing the same bar today, and the usual response, sending more of it, is the expensive way to fix that.
The cheap way is to fix the message. Four of the five things this tool checks cost nothing to change, and the largest of them is worth more than any amount of extra volume.
Gem’s report contradicts itself on subject length: the chart labels three words as best while the body text says two. We have not picked the more flattering number. The tool reports the supported range of two to five words and tells you the contradiction exists, because a benchmark you cannot audit is not worth much.
The Candidates Per Hire Calculator tells you how many people you need to contact. This tells you how to contact them, and the two multiply: improving your reply rate from 8.8% to 16.3% roughly halves the number of candidates you need to source for the same hire. Build the search itself with the X-ray Search Builder.
How many candidates you must source for a hire in your role and industry, from cited benchmark data.
Paste a job ad and see what the evidence says is costing you applications, with the studies behind each check.
Turn a role into a Google or Bing query that searches public profiles across eleven networks, including LinkedIn, GitHub and Google Scholar.
A better email only helps if it reaches the right people. HeroHunt finds candidates across 1 billion+ profiles, screens them against your role, and runs the sequence with the personalisation already filled in.
