The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer

Ultimately, if you want to have a recruiter do a better job, ensure they include two out of three pieces of personalization.

7. Start on the right front

Make sure you start with a pro intro, which means putting personalization up front: rather than stick with a bland opening, try something specific.

"Pete, I am reaching out to you given your strong front-end development experience, particularly with JavaScript. Your unique mix of front-end and back-end knowledge and experience really caught the attention of our current developer manager.”

Typical openings like “I was impressed with your profile,” “Sorry for the email,” and “Hi, my name is,” do not really help you stand out and thus are ineffective (63% of them looks fairly identical).

If you are really feeling incredibly lazy, one way you could probably easily make your email better is if you look at this. After your recruiter has written that first draft, take out the first sentence. That is it. It is usually much, much better.

8. Follow up, don't spam

Most of the emails directed to "Pete" came from an organization or came from a recruiter that he heard from previously. But a mere twelve percent acknowledged it was a follow-up.

Making sure your contact knows that it is your second time reaching out is critical as it helps to maintain a conversation history. As individuals, the longer the history we have with a given person, the stronger the relationship we perceive.

When you reach out to someone and say, "Hey, I wanted to see if you would be interested in this role," and then you reach out to that person again with, "Hey, I wanted to see if you would be interested in this new role. I’m really impressed with you," it implies ignored history and the candidate is not really worth their time. The outreach immediately becomes less sincere and is interpreted as spam.

9. You, Your, Yours

Out of the hundreds of emails from 300+ recruiters, there were a mere five that stood out. As it turns out however, they all shared the same thread: the use of the second person.

Instead of saying, "Hi, I’m a recruiter. We have some great positions over here. Call me," it was more along the lines of "From what I understand you are a JavaScript expert. This would take your career more in the direction of new media content and I would love to learn more about you and your interests."

10. Do not do what I did

The reason that Wherry got into this predicament in the first place was because these JavaScript experts were so hard to find. In a nutshell, don’t do this!

Outside of finding good recruiters, employing the right sourcing techniques, beating a hiring crunch involves hiring more managers and specifically managers who can help recruit. Their networks and expertise in reaching people in non-traditional ways will be beneficial, as opposed to bringing on individual contributors in a non-methodical fashion.

A final rule of thumb

Solving the hiring crisis is a lot like any other engineering problem: you break down each piece of the process and you say, "Where are we losing people within our funnel?"

A good rule of thumb is to double check. Generally, your recruiter should be getting about a 12 to 20 percent response rate from cold outreach. That is just a good rule of thumb, to double check.