How To Write Candidate-Targeted Outreach That Generates Replies

Capturing people’s attention online is super hard.

You tried sending a connection request on LinkedIn, coupled with a message, but it’s been 2 weeks and they haven’t connected back. Worse yet, they’ve connected, opened the message and left you on seen. See you later self-esteem.

So how do you change that?

The answer is simple.

From our experience at attract.ai, it’s a two-part equation.

Great outreach + Great people sending it = Replies.

First, let’s start with people.

Get your hiring managers, talent acquisition team or even co-founder involved in the outreach stage and to send these messages. LinkedIn is a powerful tool and one that should be used, but make sure your profile is optimised to its greatest potential before you start engaging.

It’s also incredibly personal and helps establish a certain level of trust. It’s also great for employer branding!

Secondly, create highly personalised outreach.

Rachel Saunders, a Yahoo Recruiter, reveals in a LinkedIn interview,

“When I send a mildly tailored email, I usually get a 25% response rate. However, when I really customize the email and show the candidate I’ve done my homework, the response rate jumps to 60-70%.”

If you’re sending generic and templated outreach, then it should really come as no surprise that your response rates are low. So please. Stop. Sending. Templated. And. Generic. Messages.

Through the power of personalisation, you can transform your response rates.

Personalisation is everywhere in our lives and it helps to enhance the customer experience. Therefore, it’s advantageous to you and your response rates to leverage it.

Just be warned though, writing great outreach takes time but the ROI is high. Templated outreach take seconds. Highly personalised outreach? Can take up to 5-15minutes each. And if you’re writing outreach for a list of potential candidates, that easily extrapolates out to hours of your time. And we get it, nobody’s got time for that!

That’s why at attract.ai, we’ve created a personalised outreach generator that helps us generate highly personal messages for our clients so that way, 90% of the work is already done for them.

All they have to do is review, copy, paste and send. To guarantee each and every message is at a high quality, we then have a member of our Sourcing Optimisation team comb through each message to ensure that there is a human layer baked into them.

“I’ve just gone through the backlog of outreach and the custom outreach messages were fantastic. It really speeds the process up!”

Jacob Vandevelde, IT Operations Manager, Compare The Market

Proactive outreach, made simple! If you’d like a free demo, click here.

But if you want to give it a go yourself, we’ve got a few tips and tricks to share with you.

Before we begin, I need you to repeat after me…

I am the terminator of personalisation.

Step 1.

Creating epic outreach starts with the subject titles.

Tear up their social profile and rip out any details that might be of interest to you to help you write an epic subject title.

Subject titles are the internet’s version of first impressions.

For argument’s sake, let’s pretend John, Lead Dev at Google, has a Poodle with him in his LinkedIn display photo.

Instant opportunity. Something like “Can dogs eat grapes??” is random enough to catch someone’s attention and create curiosity for them to want to read the body of the message. By the way, the answer is no. Grapes are actually highly poisonous to dogs, so please feed responsibly.

If that’s too random for your liking, something as simple as “Is that your poodle in your display photo?” is still better than “Potential opportunity you might be interested in”, which screams “this is definitely not an opportunity you might be interested in”.

Step 2.

Ace the body, the juicy bit. If you’ve read this far down the article, you’re clearly hungry for some epic outreach. So please, be our guest and take a big bite of the “The Outreach Burger”?

Bun: A soft sentence about something you found interesting about that potential candidate. E.g., “I see you spent two years working in Israel, that must’ve been a crazy fun experience!”.

Lettuce: Crisp sentence about your business. E.g., “We’ve just raised a Series B and are growing rapidly.”

Patty: 2-3 sentences on bullet points on the role, something impressive about you guys (make the patty juicy!), location and $alary range.

Sauce: Slather your interest again, let them know that you are genuinely interested in them and appreciate their skills. E.g., “I think this role would be great for you as I see you’ve worked with Vue.js and Laravel before, and we’re looking for someone who is able to share their expertise and lead our team”.

Bun: Make it a date. Let them know you like them and that you want to get to know them better. E.g., “Are you free sometime next week? Let’s chat over some burgers.”

RELATED CONTENT THAT YOU MIGHT FIND TO BE HELPFUL: Three Ultimate Tips for Writing a Killer Job Ad 

The results?

✔️Replies.

✔️And then more replies.

So many replies that your inbox will explode and you’ll be solely responsible for the Internet Crash of 2022. This will repair those dents in your self-esteem and your response rate will shoot through the roof.

Welcome to the world where your LinkedIn messages are seen AND replied to.