QUESTION: How do you do an email blast?  What goes in?  What stays out?  How do you send a resume to a company that requires completing a two-page candidate information form online?  – Norman

ANSWER: There are a couple different questions in here.  First of all, to be honest, I would probably not work with that company that requires a two-page submission online.

What I would challenge you to do is go after companies that are smaller in revenue unless you are working on retainer with those.  If I am working on a retainer, then I will do two pages of input, but I know if I am doing two pages of input I know the next step is we are dealing with an internal recruiter.  Here is what you are doing, you are loading their database.  My gut feeling is the fee agreement that you sign with them, because more that likely they did not sign yours, says they have candidate ownership.  You have no candidate ownership after three or six months.

So in effect, they have this free freelance workforce developing their database.  If they do not hire the people you present (they are not going to hire most of the people you present), and another recruiter comes along and digs up the person you had recruited eight months ago and it is a six-month agreement, they say to the other recruiter who bird dogged your candidate: “Hey, Joe, I am sorry, we already had this candidate in our database.”  Then their internal recruiter can bird dog down, contact that person, and decide that this person looks really good based on your work. Now you are not going to get paid for submitting the person.  That is one of the reasons I do not like that.  There are a whole bunch of reasons I do not like it, but it just smells of a bad process.

The only way to get through that is to help them uncover if they really have a sense of urgency to fill this now.  Again, I am not telling you what to do.  I am just saying these are the types of positions that I worked and I starved on.  These are the type of positions that big billers or people with $250,000 or more in billings, for the most part, do not work.  Whenever I talk to people that are really struggling in this business, they are chasing a lot of that stuff because there is a lot of potential there.  It is a mirage.

Your other question though, How do you do an email blast?  What goes in?  What stays out?

There are a couple different forms of email “blasts” that I do.  One is sending content to your marketplace.  By that I mean sending articles, things with valuable information to your niche, how to hire, how to onboard, how to attract, how to manage, how to lead.  We have a service where we do that for some of our clients on a done-for-you basis.

Basically you send us your list and our team does everything else.  I am not pushing that because if you wanted to do content marketing, I recommend to all my clients, whether they use us or not, is to find a freelancer that is a writer and pay them per article.  Give them topics, have them edit it, and then you can hire another freelancer that is an administrator using something like Constant Contact, ExactTarget, and MailChimp to send the emails.  Then you have them format the emails and send them out to your list.  It is a way, from that standpoint, for you to establish yourself in the market as a subject matter expert.  That is one form of email blast.

Another form of email blast that I train in my program, in depth, is how to do star candidate emails.  So not a menu of seventeen candidates we think are good, but an individual email to prospects.  This is something you can have an administrator do.  You can have a separate email account, like I can be Mike@TheRecruiterU.com and I can be MikeG@TheRecruiterU.com and my MikeG@TheRecruiterU.com could be the email I share with an administrative support person simply for the purpose of email blasts.  That way we can both look at it without me having to turn over my main email account.

Basically the email looks like this:

Hi Mr. or Ms. Hiring Manager,

In a recent engaged search, we uncovered an individual who (insert key, big accomplishment) is 187% of quota over the last 12 months with 87% new business development.  In addition this person was blah, blah, blah in these technologies, opening up these kind of accounts.  Norman, (I always put the person’s name in there another time) what is a good time for us to discuss this person in greater detail to see if he or she is a match and a fit for your team? (You do not want to use yes or no questions here).

Sincerely,

Mike Gionta

Very simple, probably 50 words or less with a lot of white space, no big signature lines, no pretty background in the email, very business, text oriented.  Depending on the quality of your list and the quality of the email, you should get 10% to 30% response rates.  These responses most likely will not be: We are hiring and let us talk Tuesday.  They will most likely be questions like:  Where is the person based?  Can you send me a resume?  (But you do not want to send a resume).  What do they make?

All those questions, by the way, are buying signals meaning they probably have an opening.  This is a way to take 40, 50, 60 hiring managers and find out the handful of warm leads that might be hiring.

Great question in both parts on getting email blasts.  On the other one, I simply would not fill out online forms.  I would have to know more about the situation, but that is what my gut tells me.