You Found 'em! Now what? - Recruitment process fundamentals

Once a candidate has been sourced, the real work of getting a response begins. The material here covers how to build outreach around actual response data rather than habit, moving through channel selection, cold calling, texting, and email construction.

• Channel selection: LinkedIn remains the top channel for quality, but Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, and WhatsApp all produce placements when candidates are active there and unresponsive elsewhere. The rule is to reach people where they already spend time rather than defaulting to one platform.
• Texting: Text messages carry a far higher open rate than email or app notifications, making them useful as a first touch, especially with younger candidates. Texts should be short, include a direct call to action, and be sent in a follow-up sequence rather than as a single message.
• Email timing and personalization: Thursday produces the strongest open and click-through rates, while weekend sends perform worst. Personalizing with a candidate's name, company, or role meaningfully lifts open rates, while misspelled names, generic templates, or holiday-blind timing kill response.
• Subject lines: Subject lines between six and ten words open best. Adding a name or company name to the subject line raises open rates, and including an emoji increases opens further, particularly among younger and female recipients, though it should be tested against the audience rather than assumed.
• Cold calling: Calls placed between four and five in the afternoon, or right before lunch, outperform other windows. Wednesday beats every other day, including the popular assumption that Thursday is best. Double dialing, rather than a single call followed by a voicemail, signals genuine interest and gets better response than any other pattern.
• Opening lines and cadence: Asking "how have you been" rather than "did I catch you at a bad time" disarms candidates and outperforms other openers by a wide margin. Stating the reason for the call early, with a stated time limit, filters interested candidates quickly. A layered cadence across call, text, and email, repeated over several touches rather than one attempt, produces the response.

Applying even one or two of these adjustments to an existing outreach routine tends to move response rates more than overhauling everything at once.