ALL POSTS

Top Tips for Writing Better Email Nurtures When Sourcing Candidates

email nurture

TLDR: Attracting both active and passive candidates requires smarter, more engaging email nurtures when you’re sourcing talent for your organization. To do this, you’ll need to create email nurtures that help you:

  • Engage net-new candidates 
  • Re-engage candidates in your talent pool
  • Move candidates down your talent pipeline
  • Keep candidates interested in your organization

There are 4 key ways you can accomplish this with your email nurtures:

  1. Provide value with insight, context, and relevant information
  2. Focus on one relevant subject or topic with each touchpoint
  3. Keep your emails short and sweet
  4. Test and track your email nurture performance

Let’s dive deeper into these top tips!

Why you need to use nurture for your sourcing emails

Much like marketers use lead nurtures to drive audience engagement, recruiters and hiring teams can leverage email nurture in much the same way. 

In a nutshell, email nurture is when you send a series of emails to people based on their behavior, providing timely or relevant information that drives value for both you (company) and the recipient (candidate). 

Email nurtures—the different series of emails you send—are a crucial part of not only engaging new candidates but also re-engaging existing candidates in your talent pools. 

A simple way of developing email nurtures is to think about the different types of nurtures you can send, such as:

  • New candidate nurtures—The timely, relevant information a new candidate would need to know when you first reach out to them.
  • Re-engagement nurtures—Details about new roles or opportunities you share with candidates who have applied in the past, those who have been turned down before, or those in your talent pool you’ve kept on hand. 

The purpose of email nurtures is to get qualified candidates into your talent pipeline, then share pertinent information about your company, culture, and roles with those candidates. 

When you take this nurture approach, your sourcing emails inherently improve, as you’re focusing on giving candidates what they need to entice them to join your organization. 

How exactly does an email nurture work?

A potential candidate will most likely have several touchpoints and interactions with other companies. For example, they may be receiving outreach from one company via LinkedIn; get emails from another company to their personal email, or hear from recruiters through job boards. 

But many of these attempts are one-offs, meaning if a recruiter doesn’t hear back from a candidate, they’ll move on with the several other people they’ve reached out to. 

Email nurture works by creating a series of touchpoints where you have consistent communication with a candidate throughout their journey of applying to or considering a new role, with the goal of converting that candidate from a job seeker to an active participant in your recruiting process. 

This can include your first outreach email, your follow-up, sharing company updates, connecting with them on LinkedIn…you get the picture!

The key, however, is to ensure that every touchpoint you have is driven by providing value to the candidate—this builds a mutually beneficial relationship between you as the recruiter and the candidate as a potential team member. 

Quick tips for your email nurtures

Before you dive into creating email nurtures, there are a few things you should keep in mind…

  • Provide timely, relevant, and applicable information: this includes details around new roles, your company culture, compensation and benefits, and any other details a candidate is likely to ask for.
  • Give them engagement content, not just job descriptions: share things like press releases, candidate-centric blog posts, company awards or mentions, etc. 
  • Make your end-goal clear: the call-to-action you use should be very obvious; so, if you want the candidate to email you back, call you, or consume content, make sure your CTAs are clear and direct. 

Top tips for writing better email nurtures when sourcing candidates

The process of nurturing candidates using sourcing emails happens over time with consistent communication and engagement. However, the investment in nurturing candidates pays off when you hire top talent that drives innovation in your business. So, let’s look at top tips for using nurture to write better sourcing emails!

Provide value with insight, context, and relevant information

As a recruiter, you’ll be using sourcing and engagement emails to nurture relationships with candidates—but it’s important to understand the roles you’re hiring for, and which type of candidate you’re looking to source, so you can provide them with the right information. Sending a candidate irrelevant content from the hop can deter them from wanting to engage further with you. 

You’ll also want to think about the questions a candidate might have when they first learn about a role, and how you can answer those questions right away—rather than leave them scratching their heads!

Focus on one relevant subject or topic with each touchpoint

With each email you send as part of your nurture series, you should focus on just one topic or subject with one call-to-action. Remember, the candidate you’re communicating with is likely hearing from several other recruiters, and you won’t benefit from giving them information overload.

So, when you send your follow-up email or other touchpoints, ensure you’re sending only one piece of relevant information per touchpoint. If the candidate responded to your first outreach with questions around benefits and perks, answer that question—not 10 others!

Of course, you can always offer to answer any further questions they have, but give them the opportunity to consume the information you’re giving them first. 

Keep your emails short and sweet

Email nurtures are not the time to worry about whether you’ve used fancy fonts, fun memes, or custom HTML. In fact, the simpler, shorter, and more succinct your emails are, the better. Keep in mind that these emails aren’t meant to act like newsletters, but direct communication between you and another human! 

This means foregoing lengthy explanations about your company, copying and pasting job descriptions into emails, or using more than one call-to-action in each email you send. Instead, opt to include only the most pressing information the candidate needs—especially for follow-up or check-in emails—and make replying or contacting you simple. 

Data from HubSpot suggests that the ideal length for touchpoint emails is a max of 125 words, so to capture and keep a candidate’s attention, make every one of those 125 words count!

Did you know, by the way, that you can automate nurture emails using LeverTRM to make sending engaging emails even easier? Our guide below shows you how.

Test and track your email nurture performance

Whether you’re sending email nurtures to just a few candidates, or you’re hiring at a high volume, you’ll want to closely monitor the performance of your emails. This is especially true for those initial touchpoints where subject lines are key to catching a candidate’s attention in their inbox. 

For example, a few of the metrics you’ll want to track when sending nurtures include:

  • Open Rate—This helps you understand which subject lines are prompting more opens, like when you A/B test subject lines and preview text 
  • Click-through Rate—Are candidates clicking on the content you share in your emails, or clicking on your dedicated CTA?
  • Unsubscribe Rate—Look at the percentage of unsubscribes you have if you’re sending cold email nurtures, like cold sourcing and outreach comms

You’ll also want to keep track of timing. If you’re noticing that candidates are more apt to open your emails between the hours of 9am and 11am versus later in the afternoon, you can schedule nurture sequences ahead of time and optimize them as you track email performance. 

Of course, there is a slew of other recruiting and outreach metrics you can track, too. By consistently monitoring these metrics, you’ll generate a greater understanding of how initiatives like email nurtures and outreach are driving hiring forward in your organization. 

Nurture candidates the right way with effective recruiting outreach

Today’s modern recruiter has a lot to contend with—including nurturing genuine relationships with top candidates to convert them from applicant to new hire. But how, exactly, do you create recruitment outreach that converts?

In our eBook, Recruiting Outreach That Converts you’ll learn everything you need to know about developing and optimizing email outreach that captures candidates’ attention and converts them.