I recently posted a recruiting question to my LinkedIn network and would like to share with the StaffBytes community. The question was “When sending emails cold to potential candidates, what is the best or most effective “subject” line you have used?” If you are a member on LinkedIn, jump in on the discussion! Go to my LinkedIn page here‚ and look under my questions.
In my‚ opinion, not enough emphasis and strategy is placed on‚ subject lines in emails - so I wanted to‚ pull together‚ knowledge from‚ others‚ in‚ the recruiting industry and find out what‚ has‚ been used and‚ what has worked.‚ Here are some of the suggested subject lines:
Hoping to network with you
A confidential career appraisal and access upper quartile job opportunities in your industry
Salary survey for (a specific industry)
Job Title + ‘Please Respond’
Challenging career opportunities with xyz ltd.
Interesting career opportunities with xyz ltd.
Message from “firm name”
Geoff, your old resume‚
Geoff, Recruiter calling
Name followed by the name-of-someone-they-know suggested we connect
Can we setup a time to talk?
Would you be available for a phone interview?
Career Opportunities at ______________
Would you be interested in opportunities at __________?
Your Resume Online - ________ Opportunities
Hi _______ - Interest in _____________
Hi _______ - _____________ is hiring
Excellent Opportunity at XXX (Direct to a personal account)
You’re professional expertise is requested (professional organization)‚
Introductions or Phone discussion requested (work account)‚
Help a friend find a new position and earn a referral bonus (any account)
Recruiter seeking numerical astrophysics Ph.D. for XXXXX
You are the answer to my client’s prayers
Someone also‚ presented‚ four great articles on the topic of “email subject lines” to check out as well:
From the i Six Sigma website comes this explanation of Six Sigma:
“¢‚¬¦a rigorous and disciplined methodology that uses data and statistical analysis to measure and improve a company’s operational performance by identifying and eliminating “defects” in manufacturing and service-related processes.”
If you’re already familiar with the Six Sigma methodology, the i Six Sigma website has a wealth of content for you, whether you’re a recruiter or job seeker. If you’re not a tenant of, or curious about, the Six Sigma process, there’s not much for you there, but it’s also not a website you’d likely stumble across if you weren’t interested, anyway.
i Six Sigma provides comprehensive resources to businesses at every level of the Six Sigma maturity. The site offers searchable job listings, a resume database with over 19,000 professionals, blog posts, newsletters (where job postings are promoted to over 38,000 subscribers), events and conferences, forums and more, all designed to assist readers in learning new skills, advancing their careers and contribute to the success of their companies through the use of Six Sigma.
Job recruiters focused on finding prospective clients or researching companies that subscribe to Six Sigma would certainly find a lot to do at i Six Sigma. Among the best resources on the site are the discussion forums, where hundreds of career- and company-related chat threads can be searched and surfed to find Six Sigma-related topics. One possible use for the forums would be to research specific companies that use the methodology, or to learn common concerns and themes in Six Sigma-prescribed employees who are seeking ways to advance their careers.
The site also has a fairly involved blogosphere area with multiple authors and plenty of topics and opinions on all things Six Sigma. While the i Six Sigma site can be a bit tricky in terms of navigation - due at least in part to its copious advertising banners that flash, blink and otherwise grapple for your attention - it must be said that anyone researching Six Sigma and its attendant capabilities would do well to make i Six Sigma their first stop.
Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform
eQuest is a different kind of online tool for human resource professionals. There are no job listings there; no quick or advanced search involving career criteria such as job description, location or desired minimum salary; you won’t find e-newsletter sign-ups or message board forums there. In fact, eQuest has virtually none of the kinds of functionality that one tends to see at the most popular job board sites.
What it has, however, is the ability to use all of the other job board sites to your advantage.
Essentially what eQuest offers is the ability for human resource departments and recruitment professionals to post their company’s available job listings to multiple online job boards all at once, thereby eliminating the need to visit multiple sites re-enter information multiple times and pay multiple vendors for essentially the same service. According to the site, eQuest manages the flow of job-posting transactions to more than 1,000 unique job boards and reaches more than 200 countries and territories worldwide daily.
And eQuest offers additional tools besides simply posting your company’s job listings on multiple sites. eQuest will also track those sites for you, providing detailed analytics in terms of where candidates are finding your listings, where they’re clicking when they find them, and which job sites are working best to bring you serious, qualified job candidates.
Ultimately, eQuest provides a fairly specialized service for a specific clientele; but it’s simple to see how a large corporation with many open job assignments at any given time would be able to realize savings of time and money by taking advantage of eQuest’s services.
Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform
Not finding what you are looking for on the web using the major search engines such as Google? In this short video, I briefly outline 11 other search engines to use other than the top three which are Google, Yahoo and MSN Live (in that order).
*For full screen, please hit the square button in the bottom right hand corner of the media player.
Another alternative to reaching candidates today, beyond phone, email and in-person meetings is text messaging. Most resumes today give multiple ways to contact candidates, along with providing cell phone numbers. The vast majority of cell phones today are advanced and have text messaging capabilites - so why not take advantage as a recruiter or sourcer?
I found a site I liked recently called Joopz, where you can set-up an account for free and send and receive text messages all online at no cost. The interface is very easy to use and displays all messages outgoing and incoming, along with other nice features. Here is an example of a recent outgoing test text for this post:
‚
You get notified online when you get‚ a reply:
‚
Texting affords recruiters and sourcers a great way to further reach out and communicate with potential job seekers and candidates. There are links to other free text messaging services online here.
Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform
Interested in recruiting and sourcing from companies that are just in the Web 2.0 space? Check out GO2Web20.net. This site claims to be the “The Complete Web 2.0 Directory” with‚ 1,807 companies currently listed along with‚ information on what‚ each company does and links to their sites. This is a great place to identify both small “under the radar” start-up companies to potentially pluck great talent from, and also show large “well known” companies that have already emerged on the scene.
There is a great blog attached to the site as well, Go2Web2.blogspot, which talks about the latest companies in this space and gives recruiters and sourcers many avenues to explore.
Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform
Hcareers is a site that is focused toward candidates in the Hospitality industries, such as Hotel, Resort, Restaurant/Bar, Casino, Travel, and Foodservice.‚ The types of candidates that you will find on this site range from everything from cooks to hotel managers to travel agents.‚ ‚ Hcareers offers employers advanced search functions so they can find exactly the types of candidates they are looking for by narrowing down experience level, industry, location, skills and more.‚
Employers can also post jobs for a fee for job seekers to search and apply to through the Hcareers website.‚ Many large employers in this industry use this site for finding candidates for their open positions; a list of all employers registered is available from a link on the main homepage.‚
Another feature of this site is an area called “Resource Center”, where job seekers can get advice and tips on searching for a new job, acing interviews, and putting together a resume.‚ There are also newsletters that both employers and job seekers can sign up for; the employer newsletter focuses on recruitment strategies and opportunities for training, and the job seeker newsletter highlights new job opportunities or companies and strategies for job searching.
Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform
DataFrenzy uses automated technology to provide job distribution and resume management for recruiters and human resource departments to effectively manage Internet employment advertising from one location. Essentially how this translates is that the site supplies the means for recruiters to search job listings from many well-known and less well-known career sites across the Internet, and then automatically matches up client resumes to those aggregated job offers.
For recruiters, this also means that DataFrenzy provides “immediate internal access to candidates within 60 seconds of the candidate submission from any job board.” On the site’s page in which they list their online partners, a‚ colorful mosaic of clickable job site logos is a veritable “who’s who” of the Internet career listing world - including the biggies like Monster and CareerBuilder as well as the niche sites like nursejobshop.com and LatPro.com.
The site offers several intriguing recruitment tools including RAM (Resume Aggregate Manager), which searches resume databases, aggregates the results, then displays the most qualified resumes at the top of a list. This functionality also keeps track of candidates previously contacted, resumes already reviewed, and more.
DataFrenzy provides a lot of introductory information about its services, but recruiters have to register and start paying before most of the site’s functionality is unlocked. As a non-registered job seeker, you’re able to search and review job listings on the site, but not apply to them without logging in.
Overall, DataFrenzy offers some decent resources for recruiters and job seekers, but if your goal is to find a site offering a free and un-logged-in set of career tools, this is not an ideal destination.
Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform
JobsInLogistics.com serves about as niche a market as you can find in career websites, but in terms of addressing the needs of that targeted audience, the site really delivers. That was a logistics industry joke. A bad one, perhaps, but if you understood it enough to groan at its poor humor, JobsInLogistics.com probably has something for you. That’s because this is a site that specifically focuses on career opportunities in logistics, supply chain, transportation, freight forwarding, 3PL, distribution, purchasing and manufacturing. The site offers quite a bit of content for both job seekers and recruiters alike, with a clearly-organized and user-friendly interface that encourages web browsing.
Registration on JobsInLogistics.com is free for recruiters, although there is a rate structure in place for posting job openings. Still, recruiters can take advantage of Job Cloning and Candidate Tracker, online tools that the site boasts “reduce time in posting jobs and in reviewing and managing applicants’ resume responses”. Candidate Tracker is free to use, and stores resumes submitted for the recruiter’s jobs for 90 days. Recruiters can also organize their candidates using a number of criteria for quick and easy access when contacted from an employer for more information.
Job seekers can take advantage of most of the site’s tools without registration, or for free with registration; the only difference seems to be that a job seeker can post their resume to the JobsInLogistics.com database when they register. The site also provides resume writing advice and plenty of off-site links to industry-specific employers.
JobsInLogistics.com isn’t the most up-to-date site you’ll find; there are no e-newsletters to subscribe to; no RSS capabilities or blogs or forums. But for the audience it’s serving and the industries it covers, the extra bells and whistles likely aren’t necessary. This is a site that understands its purpose and knows how to drive its point home. And yes, that’s another awful logistics joke. Sorry about that.
Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform
Let’s face it, most IT Recruiters do NOT come from technical backgrounds.‚ Most of us come from some type of sales or marketing background.‚ Sometimes we need a little help when it comes to having a discussion with a candidate who is talking tech talk.‚ This comes into play when we need to tech screen candidates before we submit them to our clients.‚
I’ve found a few different websites that list technical interview questions for different skill sets, but one stuck out to me because it seemed very easy to understand and navigate through.‚ The website DevBistro is a site that serves several different functions: a place for recruiters and employers to post jobs for a fee, search resumes, a place to read tech articles and learn about technology, and a place where technical interview questions and answers have been complied.‚
These questions have been taken from multiple sources such as a website called TechInterviews (which I find is difficult to navigate through and some of the links don’t seem to work), and some have even been submitted by candidates who have been asked these questions by specific employers.
On this particular site, they have a number of different tech categories listed, and each one includes multiple questions and answers about the technology.‚ A lot of the questions and answers are written in a way that a recruiter would understand if the candidate is answering the question wrong or not.‚ For the questions that don’t have answers with them, those questions could be asked by the recruiter and then the answers could be reviewed by someone who you feel is an expert with that technology who could properly grade the answers given.
Recruiters can also learn from looking at the interview questions and answers.‚ We aren’t going to understand everything, but it could always be helpful in becoming more confident when a candidate is talking technical with you.
Comment