Email Deliverability Tools for Recruiters

Posted by Jonathan Kidder on November 17, 2020January 27, 2023

Have you ever sent a fantastic recruiter email to a passive candidate never to hear anything back? Writing a well thought out email that calls out the candidate experience and interest takes a lot of time and effort for a recruiter.

Maybe this thought crossed your mind while waiting patiently for a response? Maybe your emails are being sent directly to the dreaded spam folder or maybe your email never got delivered at all? There’s a lot of good reasons for why it makes sense to test out your email deliverability when sending a recruiter message.

Here’s some reasons why it makes sense to test your email deliverability:

Before you start a sourcing email campaign.
If you are using automation tools.
If you are not getting a low response rate back from emails.
If you get a response saying they never got your email message etc.
Maybe you have a general hunch that this is the reason.

Unfortunately, on top of these reasons sometimes passive candidates do get annoyed by the amount of recruiter emails that they do receive. You could send the most well thought out message and the recipient still could consider a cold email as spam. Google and other email services will penalize you for getting sent to the spam folder over and over.

I can’t stress this enough. Take the time to send a well throughout email template. Don’t send the same message to every lead. You may not realize it – but you might be the one considered spamming. I’ve compiled a list of recruiter template emails here that you can edit and choose from (here).

Email Delivery Tools to Review:

1. Mail-Tester (Basic)

Is a free tool that analyzes your email scores. It’s a less advanced version that allows you to send up to 3 email messages per day for free. You just go to their website and copy the email address generated for you. Then you send your email to this address and you get a report.

You will receive a score (0-10) and 10 being the best. If you are receiving a score of 5-6 then you should probably take action and invest in an email tool. This is great for independent recruiters/sourcers who don’t want to have a large budget to assess this problem. You can take this information and invest later down the line.

2. Spam Check from PostMark (Basic)

This is a free tool to check your overall email deliverability. This tool will give you a basic score for you to help analyze what’s happening with your emails. Important: the lower score you get here, the better. Anything close to 5 or higher will be most probably automatically marked as spam by your prospects’ email providers.

Have you ever wanted to process the spam score of incoming or outgoing email messages, but didn’t want the hassle of managing SpamAssassin? Now you can use our lightweight JSON API and instantly integrate spam score processing in your app. This service is provided for free from Postmark, the transactional email service for web apps.

PostMark does offer a paid version of this tool.

3. GlockApps (Advanced)

If you are on a mid to large scale recruiting team. It makes sense to invest in a well developed tool that can cover all your bases. This tool has several advanced features that cover: inbox checkers, reputation checks, bounce analytics, template editors and overall content analysis. I would recommend getting a demo of this tool to see and understand all it’s benefits.

On average 51% of emails never reach the inbox! So where do they go? 26% go to spam or junk folders and 25% are never delivered. And the most common reasons are:

Domain Reputation
Authorization Fails
IP Blacklisted
Risky Content
Being Marked as spam

Glockapps works with every major email hosting sites including: Mac, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail and many others. Once you log in and go into the dashboard you will be instructed to paste in tracking code that will allow you to track all email analytics. After you send an email message you will get information listed within the tool. It will suggest content edits and ideas for reasons for why you are getting negative results.

4. MailGun (Large Scale)

I was recommended this tool by my developer friend. This ones more advanced and would be used to support a small recruiting agency with their email needs. Your deliverability is affected by a multitude of factors such as your industry, sending volume, traffic segmentation, and sender reputation. It makes sense to invest in a large scale tool if you have a team of recruiters that rely heavily on email outreach.

When you sign up for an account you will be assigned an account manager. They will assess the current state of your email strategy and infrastructure and advise you on how to build out a deliverability strategy custom to your business.

Here’s what MailGun Offers:

Deliverability and recipient engagement management.
Managed IP warmup ensures the health of your IP.
Email tracking and testing consulting.
Email Reputation and Deliverability Reports.

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Jonathan Kidder

With more than 12 years of recruitment experience, Jonathan has helped startups and small businesses find the talent they need. He runs the blog WizardSourcer, which explores the latest trends in talent sourcing, provides reviews of recruitment tools, and features interviews with prominent figures in the industry.