How to Craft the Perfect Recruiting Cold Email

Posted by Jonathan Kidder on May 27, 2020January 29, 2023

Looking to write the perfect recruiting cold call email? There are six elements you should consider critical when writing an email to a passive candidate. Recruiters need to spend the time to craft a message that is unique and personalized for reach lead. You will only have a few seconds before that lead is either responding or sending your email to the trash bin.

1. The Subject Line

Keep your subject line under 30-40 characters to make sure mobile users can read it. Remember, your subject line determines whether or not your prospect will actually open and read your message. Try to appeal to their ego and you’ll give them a “mini high” that will have them wanting more. Need some creative subject line inspiration? I wrote a post about that (here).

2. Paragraph I

The first “paragraph” should really only be a few sentences long. You should warm them up by starting off with an explanation of how you reached out to them specifically with this role in mind. Tell them how you found them, too. You should be working to prove that you did your homework. Share there blog, portfolio, social media profiles within this first paragraph. Try and pull them in with your interest.

3. Paragraph II

In the second paragraph, you need to tell the prospect what they want to know about the role you’re offering up. They mainly want to hear about a career trajectory, the expectations of the role, and the responsibilities they’d be taking on. Be honest about the workload and walk them through a “day in the life” in this position. According to LinkedIn, this is what candidates want to know the most. They want to under the project or team and what they are trying to accomplish.

4. Paragraph III

In your third paragraph, you should touch on your Employee Value Proposition, or EVP. That means covering the unique benefits the prospect would get to enjoy as an employee of your company. Make sure you frame these benefits as perks that they’ll get in exchange for bringing their unique skills and experience to the company, that way you continue to make them feel good about what they have to offer.

EVP might include discussing how there are no product managers, meaning they’ll get to drive the product development from beginning to end. You might also point out all the growth opportunities they’ll have in front of them as you expand your team to double or triple in size in the next year. Talk about the flexibility of the environment and other things they’ll enjoy. An example for us is that we’ve gone fully remote – that’s a huge plus for candidates during this time.

5. The Call to Action

Your call-to-action, or CTA, is all about getting your prospect on the phone. If you can do that, you’ve achieved your goal. Your CTA should be short and friendly, just like the rest of your email. Some people employ the strategy of telling the prospect when they’ll call, like saying: “I’ll try to catch you on the phone this Friday at noon” or you can take a more traditional approach and offer them to connect.

Be sure to keep your CTA cool and casual. This is a friendly conversation, not a sales pitch–or, at least, that’s how it should feel. Using humor has help me to get leads to respond: sending a meme or picture of my dog has paid off many times. The point is try and use creative ways to force them to respond.

6. The Signature

Your signature is critical because that’s where your prospect will look to find your contact info and anything else they need to know to get in touch with you.

Then leave your number as well. This is how they’ll be able to reach out to you now that your cold call email has sold them on the idea. I like to bold my cell number and include my time zone.

7. Personalization & Uniqueness Get Responses

Whenever reaching out to a candidate, be personalized and avoid using generic templates. Take the job out of the conversation, do not start the message or email by saying you have an opportunity. Always start the message mentioning something specific about the candidate and what made you want to reach out? Having 10 people respond from 20 reach out messages if far more efficient than sending out 100 messages and still only 10 responses.

Whenever reaching out to candidates keep the following in mind:

Unique & Creative subject line!
Personalized Content
Aim for > 50% response rate
Keep the word count to under 500 characters
Is your message optimized for reading it on a mobile device?
Keep sentences short
Free of spelling & grammatical errors (Download and use Grammarly)
Include questions and call for action
The LARGER the volume per batch of reach outs, the LOWER the response rate
Never let a response go to waste, set up future touch points

Candidate Messaging Best Practices by Dennis Ivanov

Focus on your conversion ratios and not your volume of reach outs.

Work backwards from your hire ratios to identify which messages land you bar raising candidates. Offers – on-sites – PS/OA – RPS – RO

Tailor messages to candidates. Experimentation.

Taking the time to craft a relevant message to the candidate who is more likely to pass the bar yields better results over time than email blasts.

Be thoughtful about follow ups.

No response from LinkedIn? Try another method (phone, blog, GitHub, Hiretual).

Do not stalk anyone!

No response after a few attempts? Give them time.

Relevant subject line

35% of people will only open your message if the subject line resonates with them.

Pay attention to candidate LinkedIn profiles

How a candidate writes their profile can show what method of contact they are most likely to respond to.
Check previous messages to see which ones were/weren’t accepted and what type of messaging they used.

Customize messages to candidates even when using a template

Compliment them on their accomplishments!
What is something you can connect with the candidate on? Make sure to personalize your outreach.

Need more examples? I’ve crowd-sourced a list of recruiter templates from the largest tech companies in the world including Facebook, Google, and Amazon (here).

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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.