Email Your Network to Find Applicants — Avoid This Mistake

Referrals that come from your network are likely the most reliable and best-suited for your needs.*

*There is always an asterisk, isn’t there? If you are selective about who you request referrals from, their recommendation can be well-suited for your needs. This applies to appliances, restaurants, and yes, even applicants. Let’s focus in on recommendations for applicants.

How You May Email Your Network Now

We’re seeking talented individuals. We spend time putting together a glamorous job description. We make sure the job is published on our website through our applicant tracking software. We then scour our contact list for those in our network that are the “connectors”–to borrow a term from Malcolm Gladwell. Now we email our selected list of connectors.

“Hi! We have a position available. Let me tell you about it, and if you know of someone who would fit, please send this to that person. Tell them to email me at xyz@mycompany.com.”

Congratulations! You have now created more work for yourself.

Improve How You Email Your Network

This is one of the big mistakes made when emailing our networks, especially when we’re in a hurry. The basic improvement is to switch out your email address for the url of the online employment application. Rather than manually entering in an applicant’s information after you receive it via email, have the applicant enter the information in directly themselves.

Usually, you track applicant sources with applicant tracking software. Then, you can even run reports based on those sources. ExactHire ATS does something even cooler: it allows you to customize the referral information into a unique link. By using our job listing promotion tools, you can enter specific text to create a customized link.

For example, I might enter “RShuck Professional”, and then “RShuck Personal” on another, so that I generate two links to send to two different batches of contacts. When the referred applicants apply, their sources will appear in our ExactHire applicant tracking software as having come from RShuck Professional or RShuck Personal.

If you are so inclined, you could send out individual links to your contacts such as “RShuck to JTimberlake”. In this way, anyone who received JTimberlake ‘s link could apply and it would be tracked back to him as being the “connector”. This is extremely valuable when seeking applicants for hard-to-fill positions, especially when trying to offer a bonus for the referral.

For more information on how to engage applicants using custom links: ExactHire clients can visit our Knowledge Base, and prospective clients can schedule a quick consultation.

 

Image credit: Networking by Ricki888c (contact)