If you’re trying to keep your database of candidates engaged, automation tools help you stay touch with them without spending hours manually sending individual messages.
The trouble is, candidates won’t be engaged if they feel like they’re being sent automated bulk emails that aren’t written directly to them.
So how do you use automation without sounding like a robot?
Ditch the formalities
If you want your automated messages to seem personal, you need to ditch the formal vocab that makes you sound robotic.
To make people think they’re getting a personal email from you, the trick is just to write how you talk!
For example, writing ‘how are you?’ instead of ‘I hope you are well’ in a bulk email will instantly make your email seem more personal.
And switching words like ‘however’ to ‘but’ and ‘thus’ to ‘so’ also makes the tone of your email more colloquial and seem less robotic.
Little changes like these in your bulk emails can make a candidate feel like you have personally reached out to them, so they’ll be a lot more likely to respond and apply to your job.
Use personalisation tools
It’s a lot nicer to receiving an email saying, ‘Hi Joanne’ rather than ‘Hi there’. Personally, I delete anything that looks like a generic bulk email – if it isn’t address to me specifically, they’re gone.
The good news is you don’t have to manually write every person’s name into emails. A good CRM or bulk emailing system will have built in personalisation tools that automatically insert every candidate’s name into your bulk messages or email subject lines.
Firefish allows you to automatically include a range of personal info in your bulk emails, including a candidate’s first name, last name and job title.
Set triggers to remind you to check-in with candidates
If you speak to a top candidate who's planning to start their job search in a few months, you can use automated triggers to reminder you to personally get in touch with that candidate at that time.
A lot of other recruiters will just write a note in the candidate record, and more often than not, forget about it. This means you can swoop in and have a personal chat with them before your competitors remember that top candidate is even looking.
Once you place the candidate, you can even use check-in triggers to stay close to your candidate. For example, you can set automated triggers to remind you every time you have a new candidate starting so you can send them a good luck or well wishes email.
Regularly checking in with candidates like this shows you care about their career journey, so you can build a strong relationship with them for years to come.
Find out which candidates didn’t complete a job application
When you send bulk emails, some of your best candidates will click onto your job but won’t apply because they’re unsure about the salary or company.
Normally, you’d never get to find out who these candidates are, but if you’re using a good CRM, this doesn’t need to be the case!
Did you know your CRM can automatically tell you which candidates clicked into your job ad but didn’t apply it?
This means you have the chance to reach out to these candidates personally, find out why they didn’t complete the application and convince them to go for it.
Keep your job alerts relevant
If you want your bulk job alerts to seem tailored to your candidates – you should only send them to relevant candidates.
Would you be impressed if you got a job alert for a Finance job when you work in recruitment? Of course not!
Getting an irrelevant job alert will make your candidates instantly feel like they’re being spammed and will likely unsubscribe – meaning you can’t send the job alerts that are relevant to them in the future.
Set up automated talent pools in your CRM for the different jobs you recruit, so when a job comes in you already have your email list ready to go.
This makes it quick and easy to keep your candidates engaged with you and your jobs!
If you want to get more from your automated email campaigns, download the eBook to learn how to use email to pull in more candidates to your jobs.
