Four Ways That Email Automation Is Revolutionising Recruitment

1) Email Automation For Recruitment – Perfectly Structure How You Turn a Candidate Into a Hire

First up, through automation you can perfectly structure how you onboard candidates. Odds are that you already have a template for how you bring hires on board, ranging from the first interaction you have with them all the way to telling them where to find the office, how to get there and what time to show up on their first day. Following a template the same way each time can make you feel like a robot. So why not leave it to automation?

With email automation, you can set up as many templates as you need, from the moment you first contact a candidate, all the way through to onboarding:

• Cold contact and warm contact emails
• Interview emails, whether the interview is over the phone, over video chat or in person
• Assignment emails, if necessary
• Rejection emails for the unlucky candidates

And then when it comes to actually onboarding new hires:

• Offer emails
• Emails with further information, if necessary

The best thing about automating these emails is that you’ll never miss a single one. Not only that, but you won’t spend half the time setting up each template and populating your CRM database with info, compared to sending each email manually.

2) Never, Ever Miss a Follow-up Email

Following up: it can be a chore, but it has to be done. Right?

Not anymore! With email automation, you can set up your CRM platform to email a candidate automatically with a set template. Let’s say that you emailed a candidate about a position, and they expressed their interest. You emailed them back with further details, but they didn’t get back to you for a week. Now, that could be for any reason: maybe they lost or broke their phone, maybe they forgot the password to their email account, or maybe they weren’t interested. That’s when you normally spend a little time writing an email to them: did you not like the position? Maybe there’s something else we can do for you?

Now, with a CRM, you can set up an email just like that to send automatically. Once a certain trigger point has been reached- say, exactly one week after the last email- your CRM can automatically send a short email asking the candidate what they thought of the position. All without you having to lift a finger!

3) Increase Email Click-Throughs With Personalisation

Now, you might baulk at the idea of an ‘automatic email’. But it doesn’t have to be as robotic as as personality-free as you might think. Why? Because of email personalisation. Email personalisation is exactly what it sounds like: making an email more personal based on a candidate’s own data. Let’s say that you know a candidate is from Bristol: well, you can set up your email template to say something like…

How’s the weather down in [Location]?

Your CRM will automatically insert the data wherever you tell it to, and your candidate will see…

How’s the weather down in Bristol?

And of course, you’re not limited just to location data. You could use:

• The candidate’s first name or surname
• The time of day, e.g. ‘We wanted to grab you just after your morning coffee!’, or ‘We know you must have had a busy day today…’
• The candidate’s birthday, e.g. ‘Did you have a great birthday?’
• A reference to another holiday, e.g. ‘We hope you didn’t stuff yourself too much with pancakes.’

The point is to build rapport with your candidate. According to research by Aberdeen Group, personalised emails increase click-through by an average of 14%.

You can even use your CRM email templates to create unique email signatures to build trust with your candidates. You can use any data that’s available to you, whether that’s something that the candidate told you, or something from their social media (so long as you sourced the data legally). That’s because CRMs give you the magical ability to…

4) Dramatically Reduce Wasted Time With Centralised Data

Whatever data you have on a candidate, it’s all in one place. CRMs have made great strides in sales and marketing, helping businesses keep track of leads and customers, but HR and recruitment have been relatively slow to take advantage of centralised data. It might not be the case where you work now, but at some point you will have come across a recruitment team that struggles to adapt to new tech: each recruiter emails candidates, calls them, messages them on social media, and stores paper CVs in their filing cabinet. But what happens when you want to go back to that talent pool for another position in the future? The data’s all over the place, and you have to start from scratch. Not with a CRM.

With a CRM, you can keep absolutely everything in one centralised database. Whether it’s information you’ve gathered about candidates from their contact with you, from social media, or that you’ve paid for, it’s all accessible through the same platform. That’s what enables a CRM to automate things like emails in the first place. And if you send email or otherwise contact a candidate through your CRM platform directly, it can keep track of what you said and when.

Frankly, though, email automation is great for every department of a business: sales, marketing, recruitment, even customer service. No matter where you use it, you’re guaranteed to save time and effort, making your recruitment process more effective and more streamlined.