How to Create a Recruitment Newsletter That Engages Talent
One of my favorite emails to open each week is a financial newsletter from a stock-trading app. It might sound boring, but it’s far from it. I have no idea how I ended up on their email list–I don’t even use the app–but their newsletter is so good I’ve avoided hitting the ‘unsubscribe’ button.
It’s filled with quippy headlines like “If you chant ‘ceramic mugs’ three times, the new Starbucks CEO might appear” and contains business news that’s relevant to the industries I work with. Even though I have no direct experience with this company, I have a positive impression of the brand based solely on this humorous and insightful newsletter. Your company can use a recruitment newsletter to achieve the same effect with prospective candidates.
Email newsletters have made a big comeback in the last few years, driven by platforms like Substack that make it fast and simple for anyone to launch one. Whether you recruit at an enterprise level or hire for just a handful of positions a year, a recruitment newsletter can help you stay connected with applicants and fill future openings faster.
Here, I’ll make a case for creating a recruiting newsletter, outline the best practices for making it great, and share a list of content ideas that will provide value and spark engagement.
Benefits of a Recruitment Newsletter
Having a recruitment newsletter offers several benefits to your recruiting team and your organization as a whole. It can help you:
Connect with your talent pool
One of the core best practices for maintaining a strong talent pool is to engage with the people in it on a regular basis. A newsletter gives you a reason to bring your company’s name to the top of their mind every week or two, and if you’re doing a good job with it (like the financial newsletter I mentioned earlier) it’ll be an email people actually look forward to receiving.
Grow your talent pipeline
There’s a reason marketing pros consider email to be among the best marketing channels even after all these years. An email list is easy to scale and you can do it at an incredibly low cost.
A recruitment newsletter offers a great way to engage for people who are interested in your company but not ready to apply for a job just yet; add a signup form to your careers page and the bottom of every job posting to invite them to join your mailing list. Being able to forward the email facilitates sharing with a friend, which further helps expand your talent pipeline.
Increase job views
When you share job openings on email, they’re seen by a much larger portion of your audience than when you share them on social media. To illustrate, consider these metrics.
The average organic reach for a LinkedIn post from a brand page is around 2%. That means if your company has 1,000 LinkedIn followers, only around 20 of them will see each organic (a.k.a unpaid) post you publish.
With email, on the other hand, average open rates for brands are around 20 to 25%. Many companies see open rates as high as 30 or 40%. That means if you have 1,000 newsletter subscribers, each message is likely to be opened by between 150 and 400 people–a lot better than just 20! The increased viewership of email dramatically boosts the visibility of your job openings.
Gain referrals
As we all know, referrals are golden. More viewers on email = more referrals = higher quality candidates for your positions.
Related: How to Make Your Employee Referral Program a Powerful Recruitment Tool
Strengthen your employer brand
Another reason I love email newsletters is that they can be long form. In the age of two-second attention spans, we don’t get many opportunities to engage with our followers for more than a few moments at a time, but someone opening your email is a departure from that trend. It’s a chance to communicate your employer brand in a meaningful way, sharing insights into your culture and building the value proposition for prospective applicants.
Find the perfect fit for your team.
Speak to one of our recruiting experts today.
Steps to Create an Engaging Recruitment Newsletter
Seek out inspiration
There are so many great newsletters out there and doing market research is both free and fun. Subscribe to newsletters from some of the brands you admire and spend a few weeks paying attention to the kind of content they put out. Take screenshots of fonts and layouts you like and jot down interesting content ideas.
Define your target audience
I recently got an email from my bank inviting me to “take advantage of these first-time homebuyer credits!” Considering it’s been 20 years since I was a first-time homebuyer (and my bank, of all places, should know that), the email went straight to the trash.
To really get the most out of email marketing, you have to personalize it for your audience. ‘Job seekers’ is a good starting point, but you can probably get a little more detailed than that. Are you looking to attract ambitious entry-level candidates? Experienced leaders? Tech-focused innovators? Corporate power-players? Building a reader avatar will help you develop content that’s relevant and more likely to be read.
Create an appealing layout
A good recruitment newsletter layout is easy to navigate and aligned with your brand. Simple is usually best.
Opt for well-spaced segments and easy-to-read headlines. Choose colors, fonts, and CTAs that are in keeping with your brand’s visual identity. The majority of emails are opened on mobile devices, so be sure to think mobile first when designing.
Set a practical cadence
Your cadence specifies how often you’ll send your newsletter. Choose a frequency that’s manageable for you to create new content and not overwhelming for recipients. Anywhere from once per week to once per month can be effective.
Write in an authentic tone
Just like our voices have a tone when we’re speaking, email newsletters (and all written content) have a tone, too. If you’ve never thought about it before, it might be hard to pin down your brand’s tone, but it can make a world of difference in how authentic and memorable your content is.
Here are some examples of how the tone of written text can influence the way it comes across.
McDonald’s
Tone: Friendly and accessible
Example: Free large fries to keep you company. Download the app and get ’em with your first purchase.
Microsoft
Tone: Knowledgeable and helpful
Example: Get spacious cloud storage, advanced security for your data and devices, and powerful productivity and creativity apps with AI, all in one plan.
Disney
Tone: Exciting and magical
Example: Feast your eyes on an all-new nighttime spectacular as it lights up the sky over World Showcase Lagoon.
If budget allows, using a professional copywriter to craft your newsletter can help ensure your tone is on point. Or, here’s a trick I like to use when I’m writing my own content. After you’ve written a first draft, go back over it the next day with a specific focus on tone. I bet you’ll notice opportunities to make the writing more conversational, informative, purposeful, or whatever adjectives describe your unique brand.
Provide relevant content
Here’s where you’ll spend the bulk of your effort: creating newsletter content that brings value to its recipients.
The primary goal of your recruitment newsletter is to attract applicants for your job openings, but that shouldn’t be its only purpose. Make it useful by offering additional content that informs, prepares, captivates, and motivates readers.
Here’s a selection of ideas.
- Featured job. Take one of your openings and go beyond sharing a boilerplate job description. Use a video to show a day in the life of that role or interview an employee describing the position in their own words.
- Interview tips. Help applicants prepare for the next step in the hiring process by providing useful information on things like expected attire and different interview formats.
- FAQs. Answer common candidate questions on hot topics like benefits and perks.
- Employee spotlights. Showcase team members for noteworthy achievements like promotions and performance milestones.
- Leadership interviews. Boost transparency by helping candidates get to know key members of your management team.
- Behind the scenes. Highlight your company culture with a look at team-building activities, employee development initiatives, and charitable work.
- Industry insights. Help candidates stay in the know about what’s going on in the field, especially if there’s something you can be first to tell them.
- Interactive elements. Drive engagement with polls, quizzes, and surveys.
Use personalization tokens and segmenting
I already touched on the importance of personalizing your emails. Now let’s cover two email features that help you achieve it: personalization tokens and segmenting.
Personalization tokens are dynamic elements of a message that can be customized using known data points about your recipients. Some common personalization tokens for recruitment emails are name, job title, and department. With personalization tokens, every recipient gets a unique and more personal version of your email.
Here’s an example of a message that’s customized using personalization tokens.
Hi {FIRST NAME},
We have some new openings in our {DEPARTMENT NAME} department that I wanted to share. I thought these would be of interest since you previously applied for our {JOB TITLE} opening.
{DEPARTMENT JOB #1}
{DEPARTMENT JOB #2}
{DEPARTMENT JOB #3}
Personalization tokens are an easy way to make a template feel more personal to a large batch of recipients.
Next up is segmenting. This is where you create different versions of a message for specific groups of recipients, or segments. Segments can be built based on a number of factors, like how long a recipient has been on your list, their experience level, where they are in the hiring funnel, or actions they’ve previously taken.
For a campaign showcasing your employee benefits, you might create three different flavors of the email message targeting three distinct audiences.
Segment A: Entry-level candidates
Segment B: Mid-level candidates
Segment C: Senior/executive candidates
Each of these groups are likely to value different things when looking for a new employer, so you can use segmenting to tailor your message accordingly.
Integrating your recruitment emails with your ATS is a great way to capitalize on all the available candidate data for segmentation and personalization.
Facilitate next steps
Provide a clear call to action in every email to help readers take the next step. ‘Apply now’ is an obvious one. Others might include ‘send this to a friend,’ ‘learn about benefits,’ or ‘talk to a recruiter’–but don’t use them all at once. Research has shown that emails with one or two calls to action typically perform best, as giving too many options can confuse recipients.
Write compelling subject lines
In general, a good subject line is short and action- or benefit-oriented. Here are some examples of concise subject lines that focus on action and the benefit to the reader.
Ace your interview with these 3 tips
Get early access to our newest openings
Learn what IT hiring managers are looking for
Use emojis and punctuation marks in moderation, being mindful of how it aligns with your brand.
A/B test
A/B testing is yet another factor that makes email such a compelling medium. In an instant, you can figure out which subject line will receive more opens or which CTA will result in more clicks. It’s a powerful feature.
Subject lines, email copy, images, send times, and days of the week are just a few of the elements you can A/B test to maximize your recruitment email performance.
Measure your success
As with any piece of your recruiting strategy, measure your email performance regularly and make tweaks to optimize the results. One month you might focus on increasing subscribers, the next on maximizing open rates, the next on boosting click-throughs, and so on.
The great thing about an email newsletter is that you can start small. Even if you have just a handful of subscribers to begin with, you can make a meaningful connection with that small group and get valuable feedback from them to improve. With time and effort, you’ll see consistent growth that will help you attract strong candidates and build a recognizable, well-liked employer brand.
