Email First. Warm Network Second. LinkedIn Last. Here's Why

You know, when you get a vacancy, where do you usually go first? And here's the thing, if your answer is LinkedIn, LinkedIn Recruiter, job boards, Boolean search, then I want to challenge this today. Because in 11 years of running my own recruitment agency, which now does 6 figures a month, and watching literally hundreds of other recruiters do this exact same thing, the ones who fill the most amount of roles the fastest are not necessarily the ones that go really wide right at the beginning. They're literally the ones who go to the warm areas first. So I want to show you the exact sequence I use with my own team, why it works, and why most recruiters get the order completely wrong. Because when they do, it's actually something that costs them, not necessarily in money, but weeks. And every single time that they have a vacancy, they run through the exact same problem every single time. Let me give you the sequence first, and then I'll explain the logic, because the logic is what makes it stick. So step 1, go to your CRM. The candidates who are already in your CRM, these are people that you've spoken to, who know you by name, who have some kind of relationship with you. Email them first, message them, call them. Go through every single person who could conceivably match the vacancy and make contact with them before you go anywhere else. I'll go into the reasons why a bit later. Second one is go to your warm network, your first-degree connections on LinkedIn, people you have maybe even on WhatsApp, candidates from literally years ago who maybe you've worked with before. People who might not be on your CRM, but you know who they are. Those people, message them, call them, reach out through whatever channel that you have. And then this is step 3, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Recruiter, job boards, external scraping, cold outreach, the people that have literally never heard from you. It's literally that order. CRM first, warm network second, cold outreach third. And the key thing is that for a lot of recruiters that I speak to, they actually reverse this. They go to LinkedIn first because that's where basically all the new people are. And in doing that, they end up skipping the most valuable part of what they're building and what they've already built. Your warmest market always has the highest ROI, always, before you go anywhere else. So just go there first. So why does warm always win? Well, the answer is actually simple, but it's not easy, and it's not easy to miss when you're in the habit of going to LinkedIn first. LinkedIn Recruiter is not your database. It's a stranger's list. And yes, it has your target market on there, but think about it. What you're asking someone to do when you contact them and it's cold outreach, you're asking a complete stranger to trust you with one of the most important decisions of their life. Literally their next job. Or if you're contacting a hiring manager, you're trying to get the person to come and work with you and they don't know who you are. That journey from stranger all the way to someone who trusts you enough to take action literally takes several stages. They have to know who you are, then they have to form some kind of opinion about you, then they have to like what they see, and then they have to trust you. And only at that point does the conversation have any real chance of even producing a result? Because when you reach someone on your CRM, someone that you've spoken to before, they've already covered some of that distance. They know you, at least by name. They have an impression of you. Maybe you've placed them before. Maybe you've had a useful conversation. Maybe you've just stayed in contact over time. And the gap between the person taking your call and a completely cold stranger taking your call is enormous. And so is the gap in how quickly that the conversation actually converts. Because with a warm contact, you can sometimes go from literally a first message to a call to a placement in a very short space of time. Contract workers, for people on a contract desk, this can happen in literally a few hours. And if you've got an immediately available candidate, this could happen within a week. But with a cold contact, you might spend a couple of days just building enough trust to even get them to a stage where they're open to having a real conversation with you. Your CRM contacts already know you. They trust you. They'll tell you yes or no in a few minutes. That in itself is priceless. So don't skip going somewhere where it's even harder. So if a warm market is so clearly better, why do so many recruiters just default to LinkedIn first? And for me, I think there's two reasons. The first is that LinkedIn feels like just more. When you search for a candidate on LinkedIn, you get thousands of results. And your CRM might have a few hundred if you're in the earlier days. So the default logic is go where the numbers are, but that logic confuses volume with what is actually valuable. So yeah, LinkedIn has more people, but more of those people will ignore you. More of those people will doubt you, and more of those people will take weeks to warm up, and more of those people probably don't trust you or even like you. So the smaller pool of warmer contacts will move faster and produce more results and quicker. That's reason number 1. The second one is habit. And I'm saying this from experience because I used to do this as well. Recruiters are generally taught to go wide, to just go and fill the pipeline, go and generate flow. And that's correct as a long-term strategy. And LinkedIn is what grows your network so that your future CRM is bigger and better and better enriched. And your future warm outreach is just a little bit more powerful. But as the first step, when you need to fill a vacancy right now, it's actually the slowest way. So there's always something worth naming here. Your CRM, it grows from your LinkedIn. Every connection you make on LinkedIn, every candidate that you speak to, every client that you work with, they should all be going into your CRM. So LinkedIn isn't your cold channel that competes with your warm channel. LinkedIn is how you build the warm channel over time. Then you use your warm channel to fill vacancies. And when you go back to LinkedIn to keep growing the warm channel, that's what allows it to grow in the long term. LinkedIn's job is to pull people into your network, not to be your first call when you have a vacancy. So I wanna explain what this actually looks like in practice because I wanna make sure that you can actually run this the next time that you get a vacancy. Before you open LinkedIn, when you have a vacancy, open up your CRM. Step 1, search your CRM for anyone who matches the vacancy criteria, not just people who have applied for something similar, anyone who has a background the location, the experience, all of that, filter it down and pull up that list. Then go and send a message, not a generic one, if you could avoid it anyway, something that acknowledges that you know them. I know we spoke 6 months ago. I'm back in touch. I have something that I think you'd actually want to hear. Keep it short, very personal, and very direct. And then the next part is follow up with a call. Sending an email or a LinkedIn message or a WhatsApp and then calling is a completely different experience to cold calling because the email set the context. The call follows up. That way when they do pick up your phone or they do hear your name, they're not caught off guard. They're often expecting to hear from you. And the fourth part is this. Once you've worked through your CRM, go to your warm network. First degree LinkedIn connections, WhatsApp, people that you've spoken to, even informally, same approach, short message, then a call. And then the fifth step, only once you've done all of that, go to LinkedIn, LinkedIn Recruiter, Sales Navigator, job boards, cold outreach. Because now you're filling in the gaps, not skipping steps. And the key thing about the sequence is that it's not slower, it's actually faster, because the people that you're reaching first are the people most likely to say yes quickly. You're not spending 2 weeks warming up a stranger or an email inbox while your warm contacts are sitting completely untouched. So literally, work the CRM first, work the warm network second, then go cold. You'll fill vacancies faster and wonder why you ever did it any other way. I know so because I had to have this conversation with myself and then internally as well with my entire team. And I want to finish on this as well. And this is something that I think that is an underlying mindset for all of this, because if you get this mindset bit right, then the sequence becomes a little bit obvious. Your CRM is not an archive. It's an asset. Every candidate in your database is a relationship that you started. Some of them are dormant. Some of them you've placed before and some of them that you've spoken to once, maybe even 3 years ago and then lost touch. But every single one of them has already started down the line, your pipeline. And all that means is that they already might like you, they might even trust you, and they might even be prepared to go on that journey with you. They at least have some impression of you. So treating your CRM as your first port of call is not just about speed, it's about respecting the relationship you've already built. It's saying that the work that I've done to build this network is valuable and I'm gonna use it before I go and try and build new relationships completely from scratch. And over time, if you do that consistently, something pretty remarkable happens. Your CRM, it literally fills people who trust you. Your warm outreach just gets faster and faster and your cold outreach becomes smaller and smaller over time because most of what you need is already warm and it's in your network and it's built and it's logged in your CRM. That's how you get to a point where filling a vacancy doesn't feel like starting from zero every single time. It feels like just calling a friend. So email first, warm network second, LinkedIn last, in that order every single time, because the fastest path through a placement is never the coldest one. And I want to give you the reason why I decided to share this is because I've had several experienced recruiters who I'm talking to, and this is something that I drill in with my team and then everybody that I work with as well. And this one fix had a hugely, hugely profound impact on one particular person that I'm thinking of. And I've actually recorded a full-length video of his entire journey for what it was like and what the challenges that he experiences and so on. So this is that video. Go and check it out. I'll see you there.