How To Craft A Personalized Email That Your Candidates Will Love

Why Your Candidates Aren’t Replying To You (and How to Fix It)

In 2015, an average office worker received 122 business emails daily.

That’s a lot of messages to go through. Can you imagine how much time it takes to read all of them?

Just this minor fact is enough to understand why your candidates aren’t responding to your emails.

Reason #1: Your email got lost in their inbox.

Reason #2: They’re just not interested in the position you’re offering.

Reason #3: The content of your email sounds like something you take out of a free template somewhere on the internet.

If the reason is they’re not interested in the position, there’s nothing you can do about that. If it’s just a matter of optimizing your emails, on the other hand…

That’s something you can easily solve by personalizing your outreach.

By personalizing your messages, you’re doing more than just trying to boost your engagement rate. You’re also creating a good impression for your company and indirectly helping your ultimate goal:

Attracting high-quality people who would be a crucial addition to your growth.

Amazing candidates are hard to find and they’re in high demand. They have multiple job offers with companies just as great as yours (or maybe even greater!) and all of them are just as enticing.

Personalizing your email could be the factor that will tip the scale in your favor. A survey by CareerBuilder in 2018 showed that 31% of your candidates expect a personalized email when you reach out about a job opportunity.

And no, in 2021, repeating their first name over and over isn’t enough anymore in the name of personalization.

Sourcing, Recruitment, and Personalization

So, how can you convince your prospect that your company is the one?

For that, we must do a reset, back to when your candidates didn’t even know you existed.

Just like your customers, a candidate’s experience with your recruitment team can influence their willingness to work for your company or stay in your talent pipeline.

Personalizing the messages they’re getting and their experience in your recruitment process gets you brownie points they don’t even know they’re keeping a score of.

Rachel Saunders, a Yahoo recruiter, raised her response rate to 70% from 25% just by customizing her email messages.

That’s not just 3x more response, it’s 3x more candidates to pick from!

However, personalization can easily backfire. Using an inaccurate strategy or message could put off some of your favorite candidates. This is why you’ll need some tools to help you.

Fortunately, we live in a time where you rarely have to guess anything. Using personality insights tools, you can understand your candidate and plan out a strategy before your first contact.

Beyond personalizing messages, personality insights also help you create an effective outreach strategy.

To maximize your chances of hiring the best person for the job, you need to have a strategy going in, instead of blasting out the same generic message that ends up in the trash for most of your candidates.

Personality Insights for Better Personalization

Now, let’s see how you can use personality insights to write a personalized message and craft a customized strategy for your prospects.

Let’s start with Bill. Bill is disciplined, reliable, and cautious.

Now that we know this, we can craft a personalized message that will catch Bill’s attention. As Bill is more systematic, you know that you can recruit Bill if you focus on the things Bill is interested in hearing. For example, expand more about the concrete benefits of the position and what he can learn from it instead of the culture he’ll be exposed to.

If you’re using Humantic AI, you’ll also get recommendations on how to pique Bill’s interest through your message.

From these Do’s and Don’ts, we can conclude that the email you’re crafting should be factual and served formally.

In contrast, here’s Taylor.

From this short profile, we know that Taylor is decisive, resourceful, and persuasive. So, how do you approach Taylor?

As Taylor is more people-oriented than Bill, we need to take a different approach when communicating with Taylor. Focus on Taylor as an individual, the experience Taylor will go through, the culture of the company, and how she’d fit in as an employee.

Using the information on hand, you can craft the perfect email to send to your candidates.

Let’s say that you’re tasked with contacting Taylor for a job opportunity. For optimized impact, highlight the company culture in your email to get her excited about the role.

Use phrases like:

• “Meet the most interesting bunch of people you’d ever know here.”
• “We’re so excited to see you at the interview!”
• “Your resume blew us away! We’d love to meet you in person.”

Slight changes in tone and content will be enough to make you more trustworthy than others trying to recruit your candidate.

Conclusion

When racing against time and your competition, the teammates that you are working with will make all the difference.

By learning crucial information about their behavior, preferences, and choices from personality insights, you will position yourself as the most likable recruiter (and therefore, company) in your candidate’s list.

That’s how you boost your chances of landing top talent that has the potential to help your company flourish and win. And that’s how you build a team with the most amazing talent that you’ll ever work with.