“I Wish My Recruiter Knew”: INTRO EMAILS

Welcome to our first post in our “I Wish My Recruiter Knew”series! We polled our clients, candidates and social media followers, asking them to answer a question that most search firms don’t dare ask-- what’s on their minds.

Below is the first response we received-

A CANDIDATE ASKS:

“I wish my recruiter knew how to write a good intro email. Seriously, they are all the same- insanely vague about the company and position, and way too long.”

A RECRUITER RESPONDS:

There are 3 reasons why you get such atrocious emails from most recruiters.

#1…We are all self-absorbed. You have no idea how hard it is for us to write an email that is only about you. Really, are we off me already?! Recruiters make 100 cold calls a day, and ask personal questions to people they don’t know. Think anyone with a small ego could do that?!

#2…”They are all insanely vague.” This is for protection. The recruiting equivalent of cybercrime is a candidate being given so many specifics that they ascertain the company’s identity and do an end around. This literally takes food out of a recruiter’s mouth. So we have to be insanely vague, otherwise we are being vaguely insane.

#3…Writing is hard. Not many people are good at it. Twain said, “There is a novel in all of us, and that’s where it should stay.” We say too much because we choose poorly what to say. A good intro email to you should get you excited, with a few salient data points, about the opportunity, and say nothing about the duties or job specs. That’s amateur hour. A good intro email to you should not require a swipe of your phone. Bertrand Russell would have been a great recruiter: “I wrote you a long letter because I didn’t have the time to make it shorter.”