By Mark A. Leon

As a sourcing or recruiting professional, how many times have you sent an eblast/email campaign to 100, 500, 1000, 5000 people?  I imagine a great deal of you are nodding you heads in the affirmative.

Follow up question:  How many of you have audited every profile on that list to ensure their skills, geography, pay and cultural needs are in direct alignment with the role you are filling?

I believe that number just went down.

One last question, if I may:  How many of you premise your emails to look something like this:

“Dear Anyone (we of course customize the campaign to include first name),

We had an opportunity to review your resume and believe you would be a great fit for this opportunity, but if you are not, can you refer someone or share this out……”

Now read it out loud and tell me if you see anything wrong with this.  Many of you do and yet we still do it in the recruitment community.

Why?

I have racked my brain behind that question for some time now.  I can’t believe the throw it and see what fits thinking still exists.

Look at the pros and cons on why this may be happening:

Pros: We are intelligent recruiting professionals.  We are trained to think and take the perspective of the candidate.  We understand the importance of connecting and personalizing the relationship with the candidates.  We know how costly it is to onboard a new hire, so finding the right “fit” is critical.

Cons:  We get complacent in our roles doing the same tasks repetitively because companies grow or hire the wrong people so we must backfill many roles.  It takes a professional with sales, customer service and strong knowledge breath to be a great recruiter and not all have these attributes.  Taking the time to audit, analyze and report is not something most recruiters want to do.  As the recruiting technology expands, many traditionalists do not want to learn new skills.

This may be over-simplifying, but the cons seem to be outweighing the pros.

I refer to a resource website Daily Job Fix www.dailyjobfix.com to provide me with insight on who is hiring and at what volume.  This really helps put perspective and provide valuable market intelligence on the mood of the United States and employment.  As we ramp up to “seasonal” hiring, this article will become more valuable in providing some insight on how to improve your outreach efforts, especially for high volume roles.

When we send out an eblast, we look at several factors:

• Open rate
• Click through rate
• Conversion rate (Outreach to qualified interview)
• Hires (Lead Generation to hire ratio)

When these metrics are low we are quick to blame the following:

• Our pay isn’t competitive
• Our brand isn’t strong in the marketplace
• The competition in the area is so high
• There isn’t enough available supply of talent

How often do we blame the content of your eblast and/or the lead generation list?  Not often enough

The next time you have an email campaign to blast out, look closely at the list and look for the following things:

• Is the experience in line with the experience requirement of the role?
• Is the commute reasonable given the compensation level?
• Is the candidate the right cultural fit (Ex: If they work for a mom and pop and this is a global company of 100K employees, maybe not the right fit)
• Is the first name email friendly? (Ex: FRANK or JANE should be Frank or Jane because Dear FRANK, looks very unprofessional)
• Are you following up or is this a one and out campaign (How many emails go to spam – A lot)
• Are you measuring the success or failure of your campaign (Analytics, analytics, analytics)?

If you show the candidate respect from your first interaction, you will see an improvement in quality, time to fill and cost per hire.