Recently, Kristina Finseth sat down with Brian Fink and Ryan Leary on the RecruitingDaily Sourcing School podcast to talk about candidate marketing, email copy, and social selling.

Here are some of our favorite takeaways:

Email Quality > Quantity

It’s a candidate’s market right now. This means recruiters and sourcers are sending more emails than normal. We’re talking about high volume email blasts to candidates. So what’s better - 500 emails sent to a large group right now or 50 targeted, highly personalized emails?

It’s never a good idea to cast a super wide net for a few different reasons, but the main reason is because you’re going to hurt your deliverability over time. So quality wins in this case. Make candidates feel special and take more of an outbound, sales focused approach to your outreach.

Brian says, “What happens if 500 people respond?” Can you possibly make time to have conversations with each and every one of them? Probably not.

Watch Your Metrics

What are the metrics you should be aiming for with cold outreach to candidates?

Kristina shares that you should work backwards on metrics based on your desired end result. This means - what percentage of phone interviews/screens do you want to book off of your outreach?

Most should be aiming for 80%+ open rates, 30-50% reply rates, and at least 10% booking a phone screen with the sourcer or recruiter. In general, the baseline metrics most sellers, marketers, and recruiters think they should be hitting with email outreach are set too low. We can do way better.

If replies aren’t happening, then start looking at clicks and opens (vanity metrics). What’s falling short? What’s wrong with the content?

Subject Lines Matter

Subject lines are your first impression when it comes to email. Will they be clever or interesting enough to get a candidate to open up and see what’s inside? Some companies see success with short and sweet subject lines. Some see success from long subject lines. It’s really all about testing and seeing what’s resonating with your audience.

A couple of the go-to subject lines we see perform well are:

__[First Name], recruiting coordinator role

Recruiting coordinator opportunity at [Company]__

What About Social Selling? Multi-channel is the way to go. This means you should be reaching out to candidates by phone, email, and social media platforms.

Kristina shares these tips:

LinkedIn Voice Messages Practice makes perfect, and it’s important to show that there’s a human on the other side of the outreach. Not many people are doing LinkedIn voice messages, so they can really delight your recipient and cut through the noise of recruiting InMails and messages.

Use GIFS No matter what roles you’re recruiting for, everyone laughs. Use GIFs on LinkedIn to resurface a LinkedIn voice message or bump a message back up to the top of their inbox without saying, “I’m just checking in.”

These are just some of the key takeaways from the Sourcing School podcast episode, but there’s so much more packed into it. Feel free to take a listen to the full 43-minute episode here.