What makes successful HR outreach in 2024?
Experts say that, nowadays, rockstar recruiters switch the focus from selfish company requirements to the candidates’ background and interests.
It means designing your outreach message in the job-seeker’s language to make it convincing and focusing on THEIR needs and expectations.
Only this way your outreach strategy will bring you high recruitment ROI. Besides, you will also build trust, increase engagement, establish loyal relationships, and create a positive atmosphere.
Want to be a perfect recruiter who can find, attract, and motivate superheroes for your company?
Read on, and you will discover the best HR templates, outreach strategies, tools, and techniques to make this process smooth and effective.
Outline:
Post-pandemic hiring challenges: how to tackle them?
But first, let’s talk about some of the talent assessment and recruitment trends we’ve witnessed in 2020/21.
The global economy has been hit by the 2020 pandemic. Millions of people lost their jobs, and thousands of businesses had to close, some of them for good. And in 2024, the post-pandemic world is facing problems when hiring new talents.
You might think that with millions of people who became jobless overnight, the applicant pool will be filled with potential candidates, making the HR job easier. However, the reality is quite the opposite: experts predict a shortage of qualified experts by 2030. About 85 million unfilled roles are expected, despite the availability of candidates today.
The silver lining for HRs though is that due to lockdowns and employee terminations, some skilled specialists have now appeared on the job market for the first time in many years.
Changes in the hiring process
At least for now, many businesses have shifted from traditional face-to-face interviews and offline job fairs to video conferencing and online HR outreach to find and hire the best talents.
Even the onboarding and initial training for new employees has become digitized, from implementing email marketing campaigns to creating videos for HR. What would we do without technology? I guess, turn 1-2 centuries back in time!
Headhunters must be open-minded and ready to pass all the necessary training, as well as implement and leverage online recruitment systems. Meanwhile, companies should take a step forward and invest time and money in the new tools HRs need to succeed.
Discovering the right fit
Finding the right fit (that is, the right person with the right skills at the right time) requires recruiters to look above and beyond the CVs and scrutinize critical details of candidates before initiating the hiring process. This secures the company from hiring a poor fit — ineffective and fruitless employees.
Creativity, flexibility, and due diligence analytics will remain the main trends in 2024 and allow headhunters to fill vacancies with the talent they need and help their companies succeed in the post-pandemic recovery world.
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What kind of leads are interesting to HR departments
When speaking about HRs, their needs are similar to sales and marketing. All HRs care about two aspects of leads:
- Targeting – leads that fit certain criteria
- Enrichment – leads with more data than just an email address and name
Besides targeting by skills, niches, professions, or geolocation (the easiest one), HRs often focus on employees of certain companies to headhunt them; that’s why targeting by companies is also essential. But a targeted lead is not enough. Why? The answer is simple – a targeted generated lead can contain just an email address or an email address and a name. This is not enough for proper research and lead development.
HRs develop and score leads just like sales and marketing specialists. All the additional data is used to further decide which leads have top priority and which are not suitable for the vacancy HR needs to fill.
Lead-enrichment usually consists of extracting additional data, such as:
- Secondary contact method – for example, a phone number
- Company data – information about companies the candidate worked for
- Title – the title the candidate had in a previous company
- Skills – the candidate’s primary and secondary skills
- Social profile – to learn more about a candidate (or as a 3rd contact method)
As you can see, both these aspects together make a perfect lead – it fits the vacancy, and HRs have enough additional data to make a decision about this exact candidate.
And with recruiting tools, you can facilitate and accelerate this process!
Best tools for recruitment outreach
Business process automation tools are not a need — they are a must. You just analyze your business needs, study the market, and automate as many mundane tasks as possible because there is much more work than ever before.
I mean, statistics speak for themselves:
The market offers a huge number of tools for recruiters for every taste and budget:
- Sourcing and outreach tools that help proactively search for qualified talents to fill current or future positions: Hiretual, Arya, Snov.io.
- ATS (applicant tracking systems): Pinpoint, Greenhouse, VidCruiter.
- Job description and candidate feedback software: Boost Linguistics, Gender Decoder, Textio.
- Screening and skills assessment tools: Adaface, TestDome, HR Avatar.
- Job aggregator software: ADP Workforce Now, The Applicant Manager, Indeed.
- Social media management tools: AgoraPulse, Falcon.io, Sendible.
- Collaboration tools: Asana, Slack, Trello.
- Networking software: Eventbrite, Higher Logic, Quora.
- Chatbot tools: XOR, LiveAgent, Mya.
- Background check software: GoodHire, Checkr, VICTIG Screening Solutions.
- Video interview platforms: MyInterview, SparkHire, Avature.
- Onboarding tools: Bamboo HR, Paycor Perform, Workday HCM.
We’ve provided 3 examples for each category, but there are hundreds of solutions you can choose from. Based on your hiring processes, select and implement instruments that suit you best.
But for now, let’s just pause on one tool to see how a digital instrument can help you automate your HR outreach.
How to hire rockstars: outreach campaign steps
You probably know big recruitment instruments like LinkedIn, AngelList, Kenexa, etc. But other productivity tools like Snov.io are often left unnoticed by many headhunters, so take a minute to discover its potential.
The more features in the box, the better! With this platform, you have an opportunity to not only find valid contact details of perfect candidates but also to build a detailed personalized outreach campaign that runs automatically and saves you a huge deal of time.
To make a great 1st impression as an HR outreach specialist, boost engagement, and build stronger connections, we advise that you split your recruitment outreach process into four steps:
- Build your brand
- Define your candidate’s persona
- Collect your perfect candidates’ email addresses
- Structure, format, compose and send out your email messages
- Manage your outreach email campaign
Let’s go through each step in detail.
Step 1. Build your brand
Statistics prove that a strong company brand will help you find and retain the best talents as they always consider who to work with before applying:
- 79% of job applicants will take into account a company’s mission statement before applying.
- 62% of job seekers check company’s profiles on social media platforms to evaluate the employer brand and vision.
- 80% of HR experts state that a company’s brand has a huge impact on its ability to attract great talents.
- A strong employer brand drops the cost per hire by 50% and turnover by 28%.
If you want to know how to complete your LinkedIn profile in the best way possible and attract the right leads , read our detailed guide on LinkedIn lead generation in 2024.
Step 2. Define your candidate’s persona
Determining your perfect candidate persona helps you define a headhunting strategy, better understand the demands of different stakeholders, and build an effective outreach strategy using email campaigns, application forms, info materials, and detailed job descriptions.
What’s a candidate persona? It’s an assumed profile or portrait of the ideal talent or a specific job position supported by details and data.
For example:
Creating an ideal candidate profile demands profound research and conversations with stakeholders and HRs to agree on crucial characteristics your perfect applicant should possess to be a great fit for your team.
Here are just a few details you need to identify your candidate persona:
- Relevant work experience
- Education in the related field
- Hard and soft skills
- Professional aims and motivators
- Desired work atmosphere
- Personal online presence, including social media
- Geographical location
This list might seem long, and it does require a lot of research, but it pays off when you find a great fit for your team who will keep delivering great results and for whom you won’t have to search for a replacement every couple of months.
Step 3. Collect your perfect candidates’ email addresses
Sure, the easiest way to reach out to job seekers is via LinkedIn.
But recently, more and more professionals have been complaining about the limit for how many connection requests they can send per day or week (the current weekly limit being only 100 invites!).
Meanwhile, others get asked to enter an email address when they send connection requests (rumor has it, five cumulative “I don’t know this person” responses to your invitations are enough for this notification to pop up on your screen.).
All this makes LinkedIn recruitment outreach less and less enjoyable.
The alternative? Collect your candidates’ email addresses and contact them via the LinkedIn automation tool.
Finding email addresses on LinkedIn
LI Prospect Finder Chrome extension works with LinkedIn free and premium accounts and allows you to get email addresses and prospects on these pages:
- Search page (search for a position, content, or specific people, find necessary emails, and add them to your candidate list).
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- Person’s profile page: go to a candidate’s LinkedIn profile, find their email, and save it to the list for future email sequences.
- Company’s profile page: go to the companies search page, select the organizations you need, and save them to your list. Then, open your prospects list, select the email addresses of the talents you are interested in, and add them to the list for your future HR outreach campaign.
Collecting email addresses from other sources
If LinkedIn isn’t your go-to source of potential candidates, don’t worry. There is another feature you can use!
You can get email contacts from any webpage — simply install the Snov.io Email Finder Chrome extension, open it on any website where you want to find email addresses of passive candidates, select specific emails, and click the “Save selected” button.
Tip from Snov.io: After finding plenty of talents and their contact details, verifying their emails will be a good thing to do. You can do it on the go individually or in bulk with Snov.io Email Verifier.
Step 4. Structure, format, compose, and send out your email messages
Now that you have found ideal job candidates and gathered all the necessary information, it’s high time you step into the main stage of your recruitment outreach — email campaign.
Let’s discuss what you should keep in mind at this point and how Snov.io can help you from the very beginning till the end.
How to craft your email outreach message
✔️ Follow a smart structure to format your messages
Make it easy for the recipient to understand who you are, what your company is, why you decided to get in touch, what the position is, and what your next steps are.
You can read our detailed article on how to introduce yourself in an email, where you will find examples and practical tips.
✔️ Spark their trust and curiosity
Don’t forget to mention how you found the candidate and include something specific about their work and skills — something that will show them that you’ve done small research and that you care about what makes them unique among other profiles.
✔️ Briefly outline the opportunity
In a couple of sentences describe the role you are offering. Don’t forget to include a job title and a quick synopsis of the job position.
✔️ Prioritize your candidate’s interests
What can grasp their attention and make them want to respond to your email? Don’t be so sure they are already interested in your offer or available for the interview. Show them that your dialogue is all about their interests and aspirations, not yours.
✔️ Set the goal and create a call-to-action
You should be super-specific in your email body about why you are contacting a candidate and what you expect from them. For example, invite them to a brief 10-minute call. In the worst case, ask them to at least inform you if they are not interested in the role.
✔️ Give some extra info about your company
Attach a link to your company website, team and corporate values pages, blog, social media profiles, etc. in your signature.
Now, let’s look at one of the HR templates you can use for your recruitment outreach that takes into consideration the tips mentioned above:
Hello {{first_name}}, My name is [YOUR NAME], and I’m looking for the new [JOB TITLE] for [YOUR COMPANY]. I saw your LinkedIn profile and noticed you’re proficient in [SKILLS] and [SKILLS]. This is exactly the type of experience and knowledge we’re looking for. More about [YOUR COMPANY]: [YOUR COMPANY SHORT DESCRIPTION]. What can we offer you? [YOUR SHORT JOB OFFER]. Here’s the full position description [JOB LINK]. We can schedule a call to discuss our offer, and I can answer any questions you may have. When’s the best time? Hope to talk to you soon! [YOUR NAME], [YOUR JOB TITLE] at [YOUR COMPANY] |
What is good about this HR email template is that it has a clear structure, company and job descriptions, and is personalized: you are showing you’ve done your homework and learned something about the candidate’s job experience and skills.
Using another recruitment outreach strategy? No worries. Snov.io has got a variety of HR templates for your easy start!
How to create an HR outreach email with Snov.io
Now that your perfect candidates’ lists are ready, you can start crafting an email drip campaign to get to know the talents better and filter them according to your needs.
With the Snov.io cold email software, you’ll be able to create a super-personalized email message. This tool allows you to add custom variables to the subject line and message body, play with fonts, add trackable links, attach up to 3MB files, and test your email before sending.
Step 5. Follow up!
Cases when your job offer is ignored come here and there. But recruitment process isn’t about giving up, so be prepared to go till the end and follow up. Don’t forget that follow-up emails increase your chances to get a response by 2x.
Consider the follow-up template you can use to remind candidates about your email:
Hey {{first_name}}, how are you doing? Truth be told, I was a bit bummed out that I never heard back from you. That said, I still consider you the best fit for a remote [JOB TITLE] position at [YOUR COMPANY]. Let’s have a chat and I’ll answer all your questions, tell you about our company, why we went remote, and why we are the perfect match. No pressure to commit, I promise. When’s the best time for a call? Best wishes, [YOUR NAME], [YOUR JOB TITLE] at [YOUR COMPANY] |
With Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns, creating follow-up emails won’t be a problem. You’ll be able to make a chain of messages that will be automatically sent to your candidates based on their behavior in the previous email.
Wrapping up
Recruitment outreach is a complicated yet captivating process. If you build it correctly, your company will never lack high-performing employees, and your teams will always be in a productive condition.
To save time and effort, use an all-in-one outreach toolkit and choose the best LinkedIn prospecting tools. It empowers you with instruments for talent search, personalized email outreach, and practical templates. What else does a recruiter need to get this part of the work done?
Sign up with Snov.io and start enjoying all the benefits for HRs today!