• Why SeekOut
  • Solution
    • Talent Search
    • Candidate Profiles
    • AI Matching
    • Diversity Hiring
    • Cleared Candidates
    • ATS Rediscovery
    • Inbound Talent
    • Candidate Engagement
    • Talent Optimization
    • Internal Talent
    • Career Hub
    • Talent Analytics
  • Customers
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Resource Center
    • Chrome Extension
    • Diversity Course
  • Company
    • About Us
    • Life at SeekOut
    • Current Openinigs
    • Newsroom
Sign In
Request a Demo

  • Why SeekOut
  • Solution
    • Talent Search
    • Candidate Profiles
    • AI Matching
    • Diversity Hiring
    • Cleared Candidates
    • ATS Rediscovery
    • Inbound Talent
    • Candidate Engagement
    • Talent Optimization
    • Internal Talent
    • Career Hub
    • Talent Analytics
  • Customers
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Resource Center
    • Chrome Extension
    • Diversity Course
  • Company
    • About Us
    • Life at SeekOut
    • Current Openinigs
    • Newsroom
Menu
  • Why SeekOut
  • Solution
    • Talent Search
    • Candidate Profiles
    • AI Matching
    • Diversity Hiring
    • Cleared Candidates
    • ATS Rediscovery
    • Inbound Talent
    • Candidate Engagement
    • Talent Optimization
    • Internal Talent
    • Career Hub
    • Talent Analytics
  • Customers
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Resource Center
    • Chrome Extension
    • Diversity Course
  • Company
    • About Us
    • Life at SeekOut
    • Current Openinigs
    • Newsroom

Recruiting

06
May
Recruiting Best Practices  ·  SeekOut
You Can’t Close If They Don’t Open: How to Up Response Rates

In a world where nearly everything has become quantifiable, it can be difficult to determine which metrics matter most. But when it comes to the top of the recruiting funnel, response rates reign supreme. And for one simple reason: you can’t close if they don’t open. 

Sure, getting a prospect to respond is the first in a series of steps, but any possibility of a relationship is done if they don’t. Not responding is a response. It’s a deliberate decision not to engage. And so, response rates work as a measure of effectiveness. 

Recently, I sat down with Ryan Leary, CMO at Recruitingdaily.com and Brian Fink, Senior Technical Recruiter at Rentpath to discuss response rates and how to move the needle. You can listen to it below: 

Truth be told, early in my career, my rates were low, hovering around 13 percent, but over time, through trial and error, I learned what works and now boast a 68 percent response rate. Brian, acknowledging that his rates are somewhere in the 30 percent range, asked for tips so others might learn. 

A Fact-Finding Mission 

My story starts in a familiar place, sending out detailed messages to potential candidates, giving them background on who I am, the company I work for, the job opening, and more. 

But despite all the time I spent crafting these messages, the rate of response wasn’t great, and I grew frustrated. Using that irritation to my advantage, I decided to go a proven route and turned to AI-powered email personalization with SeekOut. 

More like, “Hi, I’m Jackye, a recruiter at Y company. I am very impressed with your skillset and wanted to talk to you about X job. Are you interested in learning more?” 

Pretty quickly, I saw a pattern emerge as I ramped up these communications and tracked my campaign results within SeekOut. According to data provided by the software, it was clear responses went up when I kept my messages more personalized and asked for permission. My current method relies on this approach, and it’s a theme I carry through each interaction. 

The reason I ask for permission is that prospective candidates aren’t always excited to hear from recruiters. That type of thinking is assumptive. It’s a common mindset and one that recruiters likely need to move away from. 

Instead of presenting as all-knowing, I use curiosity to get the conversation going. That means including a few basics and a call to action, one that asks for permission to follow up. Doing this helps establish credibility and introduce trust, a critical factor for today’s job seekers, particularly those actively employed. 

My goal is to get to them to take the next step and track what’s working along the way so I can always improve my response rates and build a robust talent pool for the role I’m hiring for. 

Once contact is made, and a response is received, SeekOut automatically removes the candidate from the campaign, so I don’t have to do that manually. I save time on admin tasks and devote more time to creating a thoughtful response.  

The second message should explain the why. This is where I take a step back and offer up pertinent information about the job in question. It’s where I explain that I have a position in mind and am working to find the right person. 

Again, I ask their permission before getting presumptive about their intent. 

Additional Ideas 

Building on this format, I have found success with a few additional tactics. SeekOut‘s intuitive AI-powered talent intelligence platform includes suggestions for subject lines, the best time to send, and information from candidates’ unified profiles. 

Use these if and when you see fit: 

  1. Everything should be a separate email until they answer

Rather than “circle back” or look to passive-aggressive cliches like “Per my last email,” I keep each email separate until there’s a reply. An email rarely gets lost. 

By sticking to the same thread, I might wind up reminding my prospect why they didn’t engage in the first place. Whereas when I reach out with a new message, I might find they’re in a different place now, one where they don’t even remember my earlier attempt. 

But instead of assuming a candidate never saw it, I can prove they haven’t opened my emails because SeekOut tracks my outreach so I can validate my strategy with data.  

  1. Set a correspondence day

For me, correspondence day is Thursdays. I dedicate this day to doing outreach, follow-up, next steps, and updates, and by earmarking one day a week, there’s never an excuse for not getting this part of the job done. 

It creates a precedent and adds structure to my process so everyone involved knows when they will hear back (if there’s something to share). 

  1. Leverage the OOO

This is a personal favorite because I see out-of-the-office and auto-responder emails as intel, especially when they include vacation information and, hopefully, a return by date. 

Once the person gets back in the office, I send an email inquiring about the trip, knowing that they’re easing back into their routine and will likely be excited to talk about their experience. 

Closing Thoughts 

Ultimately, I’ve found that we need to move away from the expectation that prospects are sitting around waiting for your email. 

Instead, it’s up to recruiters to stay curious, be empathetic, leverage actionable data from solutions like SeekOut, and work to understand potential candidates rather than try and make them understand you. 

It’s in a shift in perspective, cadence, and nuanced messaging that the magic happens – and rates go up. Ready to improve your candidate response rate? Request a demo of SeekOut.


23
Dec
Diversity Recruiting  ·  SeekOut Events
3 Takeaways on Diversity: What I Learned at the From Day One Conference

With 2020 right around the corner, we must have 20/20 vision with our future diversity initiatives. The From Day One conference, held December 11th in Los Angeles, focused on diversity strategies. Here are 3 key lessons I learned from top-in-class diversity leaders.

1. Trust the Benefits, Trust the Research, and Take Action

I attended the Panel Discussion Getting Bias Out of Our Systems with panelists from CAA, Novartis, Southern California Edison, Joonko, and Control Risks. I learned that getting bias out of an individual or an entity takes a long time. It requires systemic change and “Educating a System,” not just changing individual attitudes. As diversity & inclusion leaders, it’s imperative to educate the system well enough to penetrate an inclusive framework. 

As you can imagine, this will take time.

According to Marion Brooks, VP of Diversity & Inclusion at Novartis, a well-rounded diversity initiative for your company is just an inch away with the right tactics. By fully grasping the benefits of diversity and trusting the research that has been done, you can solidify your strategy for leading this process.

Benefits:What are the known benefits of diverse teams?

  1. Higher Revenue
  2. Greater Innovation
  3. More Customer Needs Met

What the Research Says:

You can’t increase your diversity hiring with token efforts to diversify your talent pool. You need to make sure you have significant representation at the top of your talent funnel. According to the Harvard Business Review, if you only have one woman or one person of color in a slate of candidates, there is no chance statistically that they will be hired. Unconscious Bias is just too strong. But if at least two women or people of color are in the slate of candidates, the odds of hiring a diverse candidate goes up to 50% or more. By simply diversifying the final candidate pool, you can diversify your workforce.

The Strategy: 

Novartis’s Diversity Guideline: Novartis created a new Hiring Guideline in which they will make it a requirement to have at least one woman, and at least one person of color in the final candidate pool. This will launch on January 1st, 2020. 

Lesson Learned: We have statistics available, scholars have done research, and it is our responsibility to make something out of their efforts by implementing diversity initiatives. 

Speaking of using statistics… this leads me to the second lesson learned.

2. Use the Data, and Analyze the Insights

I sat in the Creating a Data-Driven D&I Strategysession presented by Anoop from SeekOut. I learned from my very own CEO that “big data is eating the world today”. Data and the insights they provide drive how CEOs and leaders run their businesses; data determines whether our businesses die, survive, or thrive.

The D&I sphere is a hugely rich and complex space that requires actionable insights backed by data to make informative decisions for your business. Data and AI can be used in the D&I space by leadership AND individuals to use as guidelines on how they can be better at our jobs every day and excel at the work that we do. 

Examples of Useful Data in the D&I space:

    % of diverse employees at your company
  1. Diversity stats of your competitors
  2. % of diverse employees by function% of diverse “data scientists” talent in a specific city/region% of diverse employees by title 

In the recruiting and talent acquisition space, data can be used to form concrete goals and solidify strategy. Tools like SeekOut can help you find all the data points above. Bringing us back to my first lesson from 1. Trust the benefits, Trust the research, and Take action, having solid researched data to present to your manager/executive will bring you closer to implementing diversity initiatives. 

Lesson Learned: Having data as your ally is an enormous advantage in knowing where you stand in your diversity efforts.

You can watch Anoop’s Breakout Session below!

3. Finesse the Tools, Make them your Ally 

My final point that I learned was that there are a multitude of tools that are our allies in D&I. Specifically, Textio was mentioned in several speaking sessions as being able to help fix gender-biased language.

  • Textio: Textio is an augmented writing platform that connects to your Applicant Tracking System, and rids any language that keep certain groups away from applying. Textio will not rewrite your job description, but it will highlight and suggest new words. This can help reduce bias out of the hiring process and keep your strategy more thoughtful. 

https://textanalysis.beapplied.com/

  • Ongig: https://www.ongig.com/features/job-description-text-analyzer-gender#/
  • Kat Manfield: http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/
  • Lesson Learned: My biggest takeaway from the From Day One conference is that a diverse yet inclusive vision is not a “nice to have” but a “must have”, and that doing it right takes time and deliberate effort. Implementing diversity initiatives is complex, layered, and time-consuming. However, doing it right is worth it, and you can utilize the data and finesse the tools to set you up for success.  




    Find Us

    1110 112th Ave NE, 4th Floor Bellevue, WA, 98004
    Facebook-f Twitter Youtube Linkedin

    Solutions

    Talent Search
    Candidate Profiles
    AI Matching
    Diversity Hiring
    Cleared Candidates
    ATS Rediscovery
    Inbound Talent
    Candidate Engagement
    Talent Optimization
    Internal Talent
    Career Hub
    Talent Analytics

    Company

    News & Awards
    Life at SeekOut
    Current Openings
    About
    Support
    Request Demo

    Legal

    Terms of Service
    Privacy Policy
    Security
    GDPR
    EEOC-Diversity
    Do Not Sell My Info
    Google Disclosure
    SeekOut © Copyright 2022