“Hope your well” & how not to be a prat when writing emails to dev’s and businesses

“Are you well today Sean?” If someone asked me this I’d think I was looking deathly ill. So why do we insist on hoping people are well? It’s weird.

Now, you might be expecting a sarcastic rant about the quality of grammar in today’s recruiter but, alas, I disappoint and instead want to focus on that most important but often rushed, first email. Having worked both on agency side and internally I’ve seen the best and worst that recruiters can produce. Collecting my thoughts on the subject I’ve come to the conclusion that some of these should be shared.

Let’s kick off with the frankly baffling tendency of recruiters to lapse into quasi-Chaucerian english phrases; “I hope you’re well”, “I believe in his exceptionalism” and the other 13,000 synonyms for “decent developer”. Pro tip: if you read it back to yourself and you can’t follow the machinations of your own mind, well, then someone who gets a lot of these unwanted mails is unlikely to be enthused to decipher it. Indeed it’s difficult to see how I, grumpy old internal recruiter, will be swayed by your insistence that the candidate is “fantastic”, “amazing” and so on. If you cannot structure a sentence, you probably aren’t top of my list for assessing a candidate’s technical ability.

Clear, normal english. Check. Now what? Relevance. Relevance, relevance, relevance. Why are you reaching out to a candidate (or indeed company) in the first place? If your answer to that is because they mention a technology once on their extensive Linkedin profile; please stop, down tools and leave. If, however, you’ve targeted someone ideal for the role, try to explain that to them succinctly — the connections that are oh so obvious in your mind may not be so clear to them. Indeed you may have a great understanding of a role but you need to show quickly and early why this is relevant to the candidate. Create a narrative that allows the mind to drift with new possibilities without explicitly demanding an immediate application — plant the seed and nurture it with detail.

Now, the devil, as they say, is in the detail and this is certainly true with passive candidate and BD emails. Personalisation is widely accepted as the quickest way to assert intimacy with a situation, so for god’s sake, do it properly. Oh you referenced where I work? Oh you saw who I know on Linkedin? Oh you mention the content on our website verbatim? Well, sure, let me run home to send me CV to you….NO. If you are trying to be efficient, and not simply spraying and praying, then dive deeper — don’t just regurgitate obvious facts; I’m aware where I work and for how long…tell me why that’s relevant to this opportunity.

So to re-cap; be a human > write normal english > pick out salient characteristics > personalise properly and finish with a taste of the upside. Highlight some of the most interesting positives; either the problems they’ll work on, the relevance of experience of the candidate…something interesting at least. But avoid a “hard sell” — I’ve found the most success has come from emails that open a dialogue as opposed to an immediate call to arms. Suggest an informal conversation (i.e. create a masked sense of urgency) and go from there.

Postscript — measure yourself. What is your response rate? Does it change if you alter the length / tone / humour / subject of your emails? Get feedback on your emails. If you’re working internally — send samples to your employees — ask them for their honest opinion. What’s the worst that could happen…