Recruiting via Spam
I grew up in the era before email, when recruiters bothered people the old fashioned way – by calling them on the phone. Junior recruiters, eager to make their first placements were handed corporate directories or lists of names and told to keep dialing until someone says yes. We would rehearse our pitches and get hung up on, cursed at, threatened and yes, occasionally thanked for the call and engaged in a conversation about career goals.
This is going to be an extremely unpopular posting and I will undoubtedly receive some hate notes for saying this, but email is basically the same thing. With the availability of professionals’ information so easily available via social media and research web sites, recruiters are stocking their databases full of relevant contacts for their niche and hitting send over and over again. Coming back are curses, threats and, about 2% of the time, a note thanking us for our contact and asking for more information about an opportunity.
Email recruiting, when done properly, is far more profitable and effective than phone solicitation. For roughly the same response rate we are now able to reach many times the number of people. We are also able to plant seeds with nearly 20% of those who open our notes and reply with something like “I am not interested now, but thank you for the note” or “please let me know about similar opportunities in the future”. These often end up to be our most valuable contacts down the line.
Email recruiting has been so effective that some companies have gone so far as to block our company’s emails from their employees. There are a couple of interactive agencies out there that have turned into glorified farm-teams of talent for our clients and our emails are now all sent back undelivered. This is really quite effective as we frankly do not have time to call through all of our contacts there to let them know about new opportunities.
So is some spam good spam? Personally, I occasionally receive a spam-type (unsolicited) email that is interesting, if not valuable. It is an incredibly small percentage and I get as annoyed as anyone with the sheer crap that flows in, but if it is well targeted and well presented and relevant to me, I will skim through it about 2% of the time. 2% is big money for whoever is sending it. Direct mail campaigners would kill for 2%. Empires can be built on 2%. Not counted are the numbers of people that hold onto it for future reference or forward it to a friend or forward it to their personal email accounts… Others are “out of the office” and are kind enough to provide us with their co-workers’ contact information so that we can recruit them also.
Some people become irate that we contacted them about career opportunities on their work email, as if their employer will look at them suspiciously for being approached by a recruiter. Some people want to know how we got their email address, as if firstname.lastname@company.com was a cleverly kept secret.
The truth is that dozens of people every year get new jobs through our office alone because of spam. Is it really such a terrible inconvenience to be contacted about career opportunities that are in your exact field, at your level or higher and in your geographic area? That seems like a favor to me. Go ahead and send the hate mail, but I think that we need to distinguish between $3 Viagra from Mexico and a highly relevant, well-targeted recruitment email.
We have taken to apologizing to the readers of our emails right up front, for the inconvenience of having contacted them. This has been a big hit. People thank us for our approach now even when they are not interested. That’s what a sore subject this is – as busy as people are in this world they are taking the time to thank us for apologizing for bothering them.
Are our competitors really awful about their attempts? Is that why some people are predisposed to being angry about recruitment emails? Do they send inquiries that are totally irrelevant? Do they send them too often?
We have a newsletter that goes out once a month that includes 8-10 of our hottest jobs around the country. Within 8-months we have gained over 1,200 opt-n subscribers. Obviously people want to hear about career opportunities in their field.
My 2 cents in that people are painting all spam with a broad brush. I get tons of junk mail and catalogs at home. Once in a while it is annoying to have to sort through it all and dump it, but once in a while I will get some info about local politics or a sale at a local store that I like or a catalog from an interesting company that I will enjoy flipping through. In the end I know that everyone is spending money to get my attention. Those that do it well will be rewarded about 2% of the time and 2% is big money. The rest will be deleted or dumped. Big deal.
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