Applying email marketing to impress potential hires

Some quirky team of awesome software engineers. Obviously.

Phone interviews are a wasted opportunity for building a strong engineering brand for your company. I’d like to show you how you can change that with a simple recipe I’ve been using for years with a lot of success.

Here is why we’re doing it wrong today:

Every time we are interviewing a candidate over the phone, we invest significant time selling our team and company. We pull out our best story as we want them to get excited about joining us. We usually start by selling the company’s mission: “We’re changing the way [some-awesome-mission-statement-goes-here], by using [ridiculously-unique-technology]”. Then comes the PR quotes we got from TechCrunch, who invested in the company and why we’re going to be a $1B business. Exciting!

But it never ends there.

Our team is even more amazing, so we continue to dazzle our poor candidate with some more information: “Three of our engineers are top contributors to [drop-cutting-edge-framework-name-here]! We have also [name], who helped creating [some-cool-monthly-meetup-group], and…”

The result: we say way too much, sometimes spending 10 minutes sharing information the candidate will never remember, yet we feel as if we missed out selling even more.

Inspire them in “offline mode” with this email template

When I interview candidates today over the phone, I invest no more than 90 seconds in selling the company & team. In order to be effective, I’ve created a short “pitch” I memorized, so I could use it without being afraid of forgetting something crucial.

At this point, I tell them “Well, I could blabber for hours about us, but I don’t want to take too much of your time. I see that the email I’ve got is ****, is that correct? If you don’t mind, I’m going to send you an email right now with some information about the company and the team. It will include some of team’s posts, videos and contribution to various projects. This way you can read more about us and get to know us better, by looking at the things we do and judge for yourself. Lets continue.”

In the meantime, this email is being sent in the background:

(with small adjustments like changing the name of the person and filling the email address. You get the idea.)

Canned response in my gmail account. Easy.

The rest of the conversation can now be focused on the candidate, as it should.

What you should include in this email:

• You can change the title of the email as you see fit, I often use “A few interesting stories about us @ Forter”.
• Tell a story, but keep the all thing short & to the point.
• The best 2–3 articles about the company — can include a blog coverage, fund-raising or anything else that shows your unique strength.
• Put your team at the front of the stage:
• [1] List of the personal blogs of your teammates, or interesting posts they wrote elsewhere. Just make sure they are okay with sharing it.
• [2] If some of your teammates contribute to Open Source projects or regularly provide answers at StackOverflow and Quora, write it down.
• [3] Any interesting talk your teammates gave in some meetup or conference? Throw it in!
• [4] If you have someone who is about to give a lecture, add “P.S. We have our own [employee name] giving a talk at [conference name + date]. You should come!”

The right information at the right time

Using this email format has helped me focus on listening instead of talking. I leave it to the candidate to decide how much time to invest in reading the email. I try to make it as interesting as possible, so it would be obvious how strong the company and the team are.

A good friend of mine shared her point of view to the impact of receiving this email, from the candidate’s standpoint:

I was on the other side of these phone calls for quite a few times, but I remember very little “selling pitches”. There were some, probably, many maybe, but they just flew by me. Maybe because I was a beginner. Having a pretty good interview run back then, and practically having the privilege of choice, I think something like a selling-pitch email would have made a world of difference in my case.

Let them have something about your company even after the phone call ends. Tell a good story. This is your brand.

P.S. did you check my latest side-projects?
1. SoftwareLeadWeekly — a free weekly email, for busy people who care about people, culture and leadership.
2. Leading Snowflakes — The Engineering Manager Handbook: practical tools and techniques for programmers who want to lead