Sandra Feldmann |Author, Founder - Itsatalent.business| Shally's Alley

Hey everybody, welcome to Shelly's Alley. You are live in the alley here today, Friday, July 19th, uh, roughly sometime in the mid to early afternoon in the United States. And of course in Europe right now it's probably early evening, right?

7 PM.

7 PM. That's not early evening. That's definitely evening, full-on evening. Well, as you can surmise already by that introduction, our guest today is from across the water, not in the United States, and from the great country of Germany. And Sandra, you live in Bavaria, right?

Right. Yeah.

Of, uh, pretzels and beers and Oktoberfest. Of course. Pretzel, beer, October. That's, you know, yeah.

Yeah. It's actually what people don't realize. It's not just a tourist thing, you know, it's, um, actually a business thing for, for a lot of companies. So if you want to do business, go to Oktoberfest. It's actually great networking and an invitation is like the thing to do, you know, when you want to have good customers, you know.

How long is it?

Oh God, I have— I think it's 2 weeks. Yeah, it's 2 weeks actually.

2 weeks?

Yeah.

Wow. Okay, so that's a long— that's a long business date. Yeah. And then of course, uh, you know, it's more than just beer. It's, it's food and It's a festival, you know, lots of festivities. Um, all right, would you actually make any hires and placements and all that while you're there?

That's actually— I, I heard about that a lot. Like, there are so many hires being made at Oktoberfest. Really? Like, it's really no joke. Actually, now you got me thinking.

What's the interview process? How many beers can you hold in one hand?

6.

Ah, no, you're too junior. 8. Okay, yeah, mid management.

Can you—

12.

Oh, you're the CEO. Oh gosh. Oh wow. Yeah, yeah, of course.

All right, well, for those of you who don't know, um, Sandra here is a renowned talent sourcer and speaker, has been in, uh— well, I think we actually met at Socio, if I'm not mistaken. Or it was one of those events, wasn't it?

Oh, I'm not really sure because I think we might have missed each other at S OSI because we skipped a few of those in between here and there. Right. Yeah, you know. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. But so, you know, Sandra has been working in the industry in executive search and HR and sourcing. And her claim to fame is the outreach part of the process and conducting candidates' initial conversation, which, if I understand correctly, at least from my experience in Germany and in some other parts of Europe, is quite different due to some laws, privacy laws, not only, but also laws about, uh, being able to contact or not contact people, um, and so on. So can you start by maybe telling us a little bit about how you compare the German and European outreach process with essentially the rest of the world? What is different about it?

Actually, I got asked that a lot, and this is actually how my my last position came about, you know, because I frequently got asked like, what's so different about the German market? Why?

I know it's very different, but most people don't. Yeah. Yeah.

They always said like, why is my outreach not working? So I had a look at this and I was like, okay, you need to stop doing this. And the subject lines with like the dollar sign tongue emoji, you could just can't do this in Germany. It's like, stop it. And just keep it rather shorter than what you do here. And just be mindful about the emojis too. And the wording. Oh, God, you know. So they said like, alright, well, why don't you just roll out your whole knowledge to the whole company and become a TA campaign manager? And I'm like, well, yeah, it does make sense. You know, because we have, back then we also had quite a few RPOs who didn't, you know, have our tonality and our voice in outreach. So I kind trained them doing this. And especially the German market was super tricky. Because it's, it's, it's definitely a cultural thing, not necessarily so much the legal stuff. I mean, of course, you know, there, it's compared to the US, you know, definitely the source of where you're having this information from matters more, you know.

Okay, the source.

Yes, yes, definitely the source. So where did you—

so if I tell them that I found them on the internet, that, that's not—

I can't say that, or it's this gray area.

Gray area. Okay.

Yeah, even contacting those people, it's always a gray area. Um, but what matters more is like the cultural thing, you know, because obviously the laws kind of reflect the cultural part as well, because people question much more, where do you get my email from, my number from super skeptical.

Why are they skeptical? Is it because they don't want career opportunities?

I think that's really just a German thing because Germans are afraid of digitization, of the internet, of being scammed, really. So the number one question they ask themselves always is like, is this a scam? If I press this button, will I delete the internet? So that's it.

I've done that. That happened. Yeah.

Yeah. So I did that once.

They wiped it. Yeah, they wiped it. And it was very early on. You know, it was like 1996 or something. And there was a bit of a delay. And then they rebooted it. And yeah, they put new batteries on it.

You sound like the IT Crowd. Do you know this? The eldest of the internet. That's right.

So really, it's a matter of, you know, suspicion, comfort level. But not quite as much legality. Now, is this true or just simply a bad rumor that there was for some time a law against calling an employee at work to recruit them? That law did exist, in fact.

It did exist, but again, it was under some restriction as well. So you were not allowed to talk to the candidate more than 5 minutes at work to distract them from work. And you had to keep it really, really short and postpone it to the evening. So when I started in recruiting, it was still in place. And oh man, I had so many calls in the evening. So headhunting was really a tough job because— definitely was.

So what if they work in the evening, then what are you supposed to do?

Sorry, say that again.

What if the job is they work the second shift or they work in the evening? You have to call them at midnight or what?

I mean, I have no clue. I have no clue.

This was a matter of, uh, protecting the company from distracting employees. That was the original.

Yeah, I honestly don't know what the, the reasons, but the reason was— but, um, I think, I think it was a little bit to protect the companies. And back then, headhunting was pretty new still, at least in Germany. I think in the US, it was totally different to just cold call people and be like, hey, I'm—

We really never had anything similar to that in the US. And in fact, there's not a lot of countries where I, in all my international travel and experience, there's not a lot of companies that abided by something as strict as that in other countries. There are some very bizarre differences in Japan compared to, let's say, other parts of Asia that have to do with the concept of saving face and the level of person who reaches out. So, as a recruiter, the recruiter should have, first of all, be representing a third party, not directly the employer. Because otherwise it's considered confrontational. And also they should have a higher level than the candidate. So if the recruiter is a junior and the candidate is a senior, that's considered inappropriate. So there's some things like that, but you could still contact them at work. This whole don't contact at work thing really came up in Germany for me mostly. But do you see this in any other country that you know of?

Well, that actually was Germany as well. Any other country or any other country? Let me think. No, other country is as strict and formal. But I think also just in terms of formality and hierarchy and stuff, Germany is pretty similar in that sense to Japanese. Also the way of you know, punctuality, preciseness, and that sort of stuff. So if you sent over information to a German candidate, they would do their research, right? Whereas maybe a US candidate would rather be like, okay, you know, just go on a call, just see what they have to offer. A German candidate would download your financial report, like your annual report, and really, you know, as a recruiter, they ask you questions.

And if you don't know, then they're like, that's not good.

Exactly. They are really instigating you. And they really read those reports, like no joke. I had so many candidates who were like, yes, I read their financial report. They seem to be stable, you know, and then, you know, they did this and, you know.

So stability also then is important. So tell me, how do you work with startups that have no annual reports?

Well, Right now, Germany has a good startup scene, but it wasn't the case necessarily a few years ago. That just started a few years ago, honestly.

So people are more willing to take a risk now.

Exactly. And it was also the question about formality in language, because we don't have the general you. We have the du and the Sie. So the formal address, like Mr. And not just the you, hey you. And that changed a lot, lot, lot over the last couple of years. Also, I have the impression like Germany has become more international anyways, you know, more startup-ish, but that's only pretty recently in the last 5 to 10 years, honestly, you know.

So what can we learn in the rest of the world about the communication that would benefit us in the sense that if you're— I'm just going to expand the concept of skepticism and suspicion, which is a healthy thing. It's, you know, here in the US, you may not be aware, but we have a very big problem that has been continuing to grow out of control with job fraud, actual job fraud, which is actually what they would be worried. So imagine, right? So given that that's a growing concern, it doesn't— it's not too far to imagine that perhaps we could benefit from the skepticism and use some of that in our own communication. So what are some of the key points beside— you said make it shorter. Which I— that can work in some cases, also not in others. I can give you examples where candidates have asked me for more information because it wasn't enough. And as a result, I would put that in the beginning of the outreach sequences to increase response rate. Likewise, I can tell you the opposite is true. So I work with a lot of different types of science communities, and in science, they appreciate the information upfront. So a lengthier email is okay. But that aside, you know, the nuances between jobs, what are some of the key— other than brevity, what are some of the key aspects of a communication sequence in outreach in Germany that we could benefit from learning?

I think, first of all, of course, show that you're a trustworthy person. How do you do this? Yeah, I mean, of course, have a professional LinkedIn account, you know, and I still see a lot of recruiters, there's no information, you don't really see if this is a scam or something, they never post, they have no banner up or no profile picture, they not engage any, anyhow, they're not networking, basically, you know, so how can you be a professional, great recruiter if you don't do those things, right? And of course, there's so much more how you can display it visually. That you're connected to the company, that you actually engage with the content of your company, right, and take part of those initiatives, right. But also the messaging itself can, can, you know, be great, but can also be super bad, you know, super generic, you know, but if you do your homework, that should be great. And a lot of recruiters unfortunately don't do their homework, they just have the job ad. And that's everything they have. They never dig deeper and engage with the team and ask for some background information. So whenever a candidate comes back with deeper questions, they don't know anything at all except for like the standard stuff, you know. But what's missing there also is the chance to do storytelling, you know, because you just don't want to repeat what's in your job ad, you just really want to—

So in the email, do the storytelling?

Yes, both. I mean, of course, you start your story in the message, and then you continue in the interview, right? Because your message is just one touchpoint, you know, during your candidate journey, you have multiple touchpoints. And of course, your LinkedIn profile is just one of them, but also your message is a big one of them. And in your message, you can display a lot of information, but a lot of people miss out on this chance, you know, because they don't use any email campaigning tools. They just put in the, basically the information from the job ad and nothing more. Plus they do a very generic outreach where a lot of people get the impression, did they even read my profile? Is this like a mass email? And as soon as you are going beyond templates even, you know, where you exchange like, hey, first name, I saw that you work at company, you know, um, then that also installs trust, right? When you make it appear as if your message was solely written for just this person, right? How could this be scam, you know? So those are just a few thoughts here.

Okay, okay. So personalization, trust, having a profile that you link from your email. So I understand the recruiter having a profile on LinkedIn, but in Germany and in many countries, LinkedIn is not very popular. So for example, if you look at the working population according to the Federal Reserve Bank and a couple of other sources, the, the size of the working population in Germany is about 54 million. In other words, people that are between the 16 and 64, you know, some people may work before and some people may work after. But for the purposes of calculating economic working age, 16 to 64, there's 54 million. Germans that have working age. But there's only, if you do a search on LinkedIn, there's only 16 million. So that means that a very large majority of people in Germany are not on LinkedIn. So if I guess, and this is by the way, not just Germany, it happens in many other countries, even in the United States, everybody's not on LinkedIn. I think the numbers here are 230 million and 203 million. So about 30 million people are not on LinkedIn, assuming that the ones that are on LinkedIn are not duplicates, which you know there's many duplicates, there's many fake profiles, there's many, right? So that brings me to the question of in countries where there's lack of trust in internet sources of data, You know, you have LinkedIn is basically an artificial world. I can create a LinkedIn profile and make up any name I want and any job history I want. So how do they, why do they trust LinkedIn if so few of them are on LinkedIn? It's, you know, and that by the way, it's not just Germany. It's many other countries as well. So how do you work around that?

Ah, good question. I mean, one thing I always look at is how many connections does a recruiter have, you know, what activities do they have, because a fake profile doesn't engage in, you know, faking that too much, you know, maybe a fake profile, but not a lot of—

yeah, maybe 40 to 100 connections and not a lot of likes on your skills. And I see what you mean.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's That's one point of verification, right? And of course, you can never know. But from what I can say from the outreaches that I got or my friends got, the outreaches that were scam were just so bad that they were obviously scam. And the ones who weren't were extremely, extremely good, where it goes to a level where you just can't know. We had one case in the past, I'd say.

That's real fraud.

That was real fraud, you know, and where the person contacted us and asked us, is this person working with you? And we were like, no, you know, it was very well designed.

I mean, it was, yes, a real crime, not, not just somebody, you know, sending.

Yes, exactly. So there's crime in their scam, I would say, you know.

Right, right, right, right, right. So in your outreach with your messaging and also texting, Is that, is that part of the sequence or is it really, is email really the only acceptable outreach method?

Of course there's more to LinkedIn or more than LinkedIn, and that's also email. And I personally, I think you should always mix and match, you know, so texting is okay. Yes. Don't just use one. Method. But texting, like WhatsApp or something, I wouldn't do that in Germany, honestly.

No. Okay.

No, because that people will definitely delete and kind of feel like that's an invasion into their privacy, you know.

Email and LinkedIn. But what about call?

Call is It's okay.

Yeah.

That's also pretty old. You know, so that's been long done. But even there, you know, when I called and I had more of blue worker at the phone, I would first of all have to explain what headhunting really is, you know, right. And the first 10 minutes, why you're even calling, that scam feeling again. Also, we have a mini LinkedIn, I call it, called Xing, which is now again, a little bit on the rise. It's been in— when it started, it was quite comparable to LinkedIn. And then it was suddenly dead when, you know, LinkedIn grew immensely. And now they're throwing a lot of initiatives, and you can see them on any HR event. And they do a lot of stuff. But, um, and there's the contact.

Is that strictly— I know VKontakte is big in Russia. Um, is it in Germany?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Russia has also its own LinkedIn firm in that sense. Yeah, so it— well, it's, it's a bit unfortunate, but other platforms are not as popular as LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is the, I guess, the most trusted one, you know.

And even now, it's not saying very much because it's 16% out of 64 million. Yeah, that's, yeah, so that's not very many.

Yeah, I mean, what we would do when I was headhunting is engage a company. But it was pretty, it was very, very long ago. It was, I think, 15 years ago or something. And we would employ an agency who would use stories, you know, cold call stories to find out a number, which you wouldn't necessarily find anywhere online, right? And then they gave us all those numbers. And I just called through and, you know, also said something like, I got your number because somebody recommended it to me, you know, stuff like this.

Yeah, that's really frowned upon in many— nowadays it's called pretexting, and it's lost a lot of favor. In fact, in the United States, there was a law that was passed against pretexting because it was being abused by law enforcement officers. So during investigation—

oh, okay. Yeah, I do see what you mean. Yeah. Surf sort of stuff.

Yeah, they would say, oh look, we found your DNA on the crime scene. And of course that was not true. So the interviewer, the person that was being interviewed would admit to the crime because they thought they had evidence. And of course, hey, they admitted to the crime, so they are criminals, but still the law enforcement shouldn't have to resort to lying to catch criminals. And so that became a law that you can't do that. Uh, which, you know, is, is also not seen very well. So if you're going to do email and LinkedIn, what— is there a, um, frequency or a number, like how many or how far apart? Is there some acceptable standard, or that— or, or maybe not acceptable, but what works best?

Yeah, I mean, we tried a lot of stuff, you know. And also, it, it not only— what we, what we found out, it not only depended on what the candidate feels comfortable with, but also what the recruiter feels comfortable with. Sometimes companies neglect that thought, you know, because they just look at the candidate side. And I know, I mean, of course, we want to convince the candidate.

Yeah, it's your job if you're the recruiter.

I know, I know. Of course not. No. But, um, it, it still has to feel like you and authentic.

Authentic.

Yeah. Like we had a lot of times when people felt super cringe, you know, uh, at a certain amount of messages, you know. Um, and I think we need to respect that in a sense, you know.

Do you feel like there's a li— so, uh, 3, 5, it was 5 seems to— more than 5 makes people cringe.

Yes, yes, exactly.

On both sides, the recipient and the sender.

Yeah, yeah. I think the candidates probably would have accepted more, but especially at 5, especially—

it starts to become—

oh yeah, the sources. Yeah.

And what about the space in between? So once every day, 2 days, a week, how far apart?

Yeah, so we had the thing where we first would send out an email and then also use LinkedIn as a second channel within mail. And that was 3 days apart.

You know, that's comfortable.

Yeah. So because we were like, okay, you know, maybe someone's not opening email, whatever. And yeah, yeah.

Or they don't get it, or are they— they go to spam and they don't see it.

Exactly. And what, what, you know, what we could see that people said, oh, I got your email. And it reminded me again to have a look at it. And, you know, on LinkedIn, then they have another proof that this is real. Yeah, they can see you a little bit better than to. And but the most responses we got from the follow-up. And so the third message was then an email, again, the follow-up email. And the fourth message was, again, an in-mail follow-up. And the initial outreach is the, this, the first two messages were pretty similar, just giving a lot of information, a little bit of extra information. And the follow-up would be more fun, you know, so, so I do that.

Yeah, same thing.

Yeah. So we add a little bit of extra information, but more like what's our benefits and what's the team outing look like. So in the email follow-up, we can of course include more visual content and that's what we did.

Images?

Images. Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Like GIFs, images, video thumbnails. That's what we included in there. Just really the fun content, really content in sense of content marketing and really And then use the InMail as a follow-up then again. That was a kind of a fun thing that I also saw years and years ago, not 2019, at SOSU. And it was the emergency call outreach, where it's, it's kind of a gamification, because everyone loves quizzes, right? So it was kind of a quiz which said like, hey, I haven't heard back from you. And I wonder if you're falling down the stairs. And in that case, I can call the ambulance for you. But maybe you also— A, and then we would choose stuff that's seasonal. So let's say it's Christmas. So A, you got stuck in the snowstorm. B, you were bad and Bad Santa hit you or something. Right. Really?

See, you're on a family vacation. You're not responding to email.

Oh yes. You wish you were at this job right now. Really, really fun stuff, which makes you really laugh. And people would respond massively about this and be like, oh my God, that's so fun. And they would invent their own stuff and be like, it's Dee, I just got a baby.

I'm trapped under an alligator. Please send help.

No, the fun answers we got, it was just really, really cool. And also the responses were just amazing.

And humor is always— yeah, I find humor, appropriate humor, situational humor, self-deprecating humor and situational humor always has a high response rate. Except for I got one time, funny story, this campaign that I have now sent out over the period of 4 or 5 months, about 9,000 messages for this one particular campaign. Very successful. It's just we have several openings and so it's more than just one position. But it's the same type of role. And out of these 9,000, I only got one time when humor was responded to very impolitely, very nasty, like mean. And it was a person whose their response was rather unhinged, like psychologically ill. Because the message was humorous, not offending in any way.

No, no, no.

It was something to the effect of like, let me tell you, this job is like your spirit animal or something like that.

Yeah.

Just playing around with it. And they replied back with like, how dare you compare my job with a spirit animal? That is nonsense. I mean, my message was like a paragraph and they sent back paragraph and paragraph after paragraph. Oh, wow. And I was like, I'm so sorry, I didn't really mean to upset you that much, but wow, you spent a lot of time. 1 out of 9,000. So, you know, generally speaking, humor does a really, really good job. What about the subject line?

Yeah. And just let me finish with the 5th message because the 5th message was the closer. And the closer is for your talent pool, you know, so obviously if they don't respond to like 4 messages, like 2 follow-ups even, you know, they don't want to like talk to you at the moment, which is fine, you know, but, and they might still be like, oh yeah, I forgot to answer, but it's fine, you know. And the closer is really like, um, I send you a connection request with this. Um, So if even if it's not for now, just, you know, let's stay in contact. And so they are then in your talent pool sort of, because whenever you now post a job on LinkedIn, they will see it probably, you know, and that will also enhance your credibility then again, you know, so not everybody of course will accept this invitation if they haven't responded to your emails before, but they might, you know, and then they're in your talent pool. Sort of. And those are the benefits of obviously then of growing that, you know.

That makes sense. Okay.

Yeah.

So it would be building, right? Building your—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, and in terms of humor also, what I wanted to say is that I got a lot of objections from people and saying, what about the Germans? We heard they don't have any humor. Should be okay. That's not right. And actually what we found is that they do have humor and we weren't sure. Okay. It's a little bit more informal, you know, because obviously, you know, in a joke you can't be like, too formal, but obviously also you don't want to hurt anyone. And people just loved it. So they do have some humor, but they also want to sense this is a genuine outreach, right? Yeah, right.

Yeah. The self-deprecating— I've been honest and vulnerable. I use my own history and my own situations. So that it's not about them, it's not personal, and it's an effort to make a connection, to be authentic, like you said. It's the authenticity of it. So, tell me about the subject lines. You said they're very different. We have a lot of stories here in the United States about people using emojis in subject lines. I have always been very much against it and in fact, have tested it multiple times with email and it does not have a positive impact. No, it does in LinkedIn messages. So emoji in LinkedIn seems to have an effect, but in email, not at all. But so you— it's interesting you say that in Europe and in Germany, that's also the case. What about other pieces of the subject line? What can we learn from the skepticism point of view? And then—

oh yeah, I actually do have a great example for this because A UK colleague came to me and she was hiring for a key account manager, really high position, like really, really well paid and stuff. And that's exactly what she put into her subject line. It was like, great salary. And then the emoji with the dollar tongue and also uh, um, multimillion sales opportunity, you know. And it wasn't clear if, if that's just, you know, what opportunity is this? Is this even a job?

You know, it sounds like a scam.

That triggered German so much. She got zero response and was like, don't, just don't do this, you know. Um, yeah, it, I think, um Generally speaking, what Germans don't like, if you sound like Wolf of Wall Street, you know, like, okay, aggressive. Yeah, this aggressive, like, you can hustle here, you can make a deal, like, quickly. That sounds too good to be true, and Germans just don't believe it, you know. Um, but rather, if you put in something like, it's super hard, you will probably find, you know, they will go, okay. More and be like, that sounds about realistic.

So what's the word for that? Radical transparency.

Yeah, radical candor. What? Yeah, Amazon thing.

No, radical truth. Okay, this is a really hard job. You probably can't do it. Oh, I want, I want.

That would be so German.

What about the length? Is there 4 or 5 words, 12 words?

Well, I think the most important thing is that it should be mobile friendly. So always make sure, well, it fits into like the mobile preview.

One word.

Exactly.

Hi, everybody. Well, because in German, the words are compounded, right?

So yeah, they're more lengthy, right?

Lengthy. Yeah.

Like stuff like this.

What's the, what's the word for toothbrush? And that's a lot longer than toothbrush.

Yeah, God, we have very complicated, uh, words.

And oh, oh, my friend once told me toothbrush holder.

There you go, all one word.

That's not three words. That's toothbrush holder is toothbrush holder.

Oh, good Lord.

So you can't do breaks and carriage returns in subject lines. So does it matter if you have the email address, like, for example, the from, the sender, does it matter if that is from the company? Do they look at your domain, for example, like, you know, it doesn't match up? And I'm asking because 2 things happened when I was mid-career. 2 things happened with my campaigns that I was working on in Germany. One of them was that the domain of the email address did not match up with the name of the company, which is actually— it was the correct domain. For example, Motorola, motorola.com. The email address was mot.com.

Oh, okay.

Maybe I got some weird responses.

So maybe it's because so big, you know, they, they just don't want to have any random email coming in. But that's, that's the domain.

If you go to the website would be motorola.com, but the email address, my email address was mot.com. So candidates would reply back, is this are you really from Motorola? And you know, in the US that doesn't happen. They don't, they don't reply back, is this really from Motorola? Um, so that was weird. And does that, does that have any, or was that just at one time?

I have never heard of this honestly before, so, um, no. But the, the thing is, is that they still prefer the private email address over Gmail, Hotmail, and Okay. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And the other thing that happened, so the job required that they spoke English even though it was in Germany. So it was a multinational company that required that the people, part of the job requirements was that they were fluent in English as well as German. And I sent out my messages with the subject line in English, no responses. Switched the subject line to German, the same message. Okay. The body in English, but the subject line in German. Instantly lots of responses.

Yes, I can 100% confirm that. So you might think like, this is logical, right? You also, the whole message you just send in English because obviously they need to—

that didn't have a problem. Yeah. They read it in English and responded in English.

Yeah. But, you know, if it's in German, it sounds legit, you know, and it would be even better if the message was in German, you know, so because it just sounds more—

I speak a little bit of German. Not very well.

There you get it.

And I didn't want to like fake translate, you know, like go to Google and translate and then send it in and then they would respond in German and then I'd be like, I have no idea.

Yeah, but I did.

I asked somebody who was a fluent German speaker what the subject line should be, and they gave me the subject line in German. And that had a huge effect. So you would recommend that appropriately for the country, you know, French, Italian, even though the body— okay.

That's actually a good point because we were reaching out globally so, so, so much. And what I did then, write handouts for the recruiters or talent sourcers. To give them a guideline, you know, what to do, what not to do. And I would contact then the team in the country and be like, if you received a message, uh, what would you want to see? What's for you scam and what's beneficial for you? So we always wrote like a guideline, uh, specifically for each country, you know, because we had, um, split up the sources more across departments than for, uh, countries, right? Or sometimes it, it mixed a little bit, right? So, yeah, you would also recruit for cultures that you were not so familiar with. And we had this also with Japanese candidates. And we weren't like familiar with like the dressing, what would you say, you know, and also have us translate a subject line, you know, with the signs, you know, what would work and what they actually liked in past messages. And that helped us pretty well, honestly. Also, we adjusted the landing page inside so we would not lead them to the global page, but to, yeah, directly to the page which was, was in Japanese then. And also adjust the benefits inside more to Japanese likings, you know, or preferences, you know, or just appropriate.

Yeah, culturally appropriate for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there were a lot, a lot of things to consider, honestly. Yeah.

Well, that's, uh, there was— we have a question from one of the participants that's a very interesting And she says, asks, what if you are new to the community and don't have many connections already? Uh, how would you— so what would you recommend?

Yeah, so, um, I know that that's— it's, it's, it's like, um, yeah, it's always hard in the beginning, I'm not gonna lie, of course, but it won't stay long hard because honestly you have, um, a limit of connection requests of 30 people, I think, in a week, you know, just use that and use it every week, you know, and send it out to people you think are interesting, who you have something in common with, interact with them. And then also engage in discussions, you know, comment on people, like people's stuff, you know, just be very active and start to post things. And then other people will also send you connection requests, right? And then also, you can connect with the candidates you're interviewing already, right? So you can grow your network pretty fast and without a lot of effort. And I think that's the first thing you can do. And I don't mean you need to have like a huge network, but a very active network. Because a lot of people think you need to have like 1000 or more connection requests, but that's not even the case. And in order to use the creator mode on LinkedIn, you only need to have like 150 connections, which is like nothing really. Um, and there you can already start your own LinkedIn Lives or, you know, uh, other formats. And the most important thing really, really is just be more active. And use this as a community, right? Not— it's, it's not just about like Instagram followers, you know, because it's, it's about connecting with people on a true level, right? That will also build your career and network naturally.

So you're saying basically start slow. I think that limit may increase, or if you have outstanding, you can remove them. But yeah, so you're saying kind of build up from it. Okay. And then we had another, would you make any modifications on the number of touchpoints in between holidays or season, summer perhaps? So you were doing 5 and we only talked about 3 days between the first and the second. But let's say it's another 3 days, another 3 days. Would you If it's a holiday, maybe skip the week and come back, or do you just keep going? What advice do you have for that?

Yeah, that's, that's always the tough thing to do, right? So what you always need to think about is that the hot take of your outreach is 2 to 3 weeks. It's not even a long period, right? Or that's at least what we had. So if your hiring manager wants your— wants the candidates at a certain time, you need to use the 3 weeks before that.

Yeah, right.

Now you have to discuss with them, look, in those 3 weeks, we will have a major holiday, or we will have this or that. Does it still make sense? Or your hiring manager will be on holidays at the end of 3 weeks. So you're like, now we need to postpone this. We use exactly that time when you are on holidays that we start even the campaign and then you come back and then we do the whole, whole thing. So you need to do this strategically. But if it's just one day in between, it's no, there's no worry about it because if you use, for example, professional email campaigns, pool campaigning tools like Sourcefile or Gem, they actually take that into consideration already. You know, of course, if there is a bridge day in between, you can just really leave that out and think about it. So always think, okay, so what does make sense?

So of course, do alter it if it does make sense, if it's a significant enough break.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's not like, like a major always work, you know. So it's, it's always a trial, a, you know, error and trial sort of thing, you know. There is no magic sauce for that fits every role, every country.

That is true. Yeah, that is true.

So it's always what works best, documented, uh, for the future, and use it again and refine it.

I'm always A/B testing. you know? So, it's a continuous evolution. And frequently, my A is the original and my B is the new experiment. So, it's not like A is a brand new version and B is also a brand new version and I'm trying to figure out which one. I'm usually evolving the A into the B. And then, if the B doesn't respond better, I stay with the A and then I change and try a different one. But there are some fairly broad guidelines, right? Like to review, for example, 5 to 7 messages or touchpoints is good. If you're not comfortable with 7, that's fine. But I think really you need to plan for 5. Even if what often happens is you're sending the second or third message and you're getting response, you don't need to send the fifth this one. But if you didn't plan for it, it's a lot harder to fit it in retro. So 5 to 7 is a good plan even if you don't get to all of them. 8 to 12 words in the subject line, you know, maximum 12. 8 is a good target. 3 to 4 words in the subject line sometimes works, but it's sometimes not enough information. So it increases skepticism, right? And a couple of the, you know, 2 to 3 days in between message So, these are general guidelines. Now, if you're looking at science, it might be more like a week between messages because, you know, things are— the pace is different. If you're looking at IT, especially like frontline technology, you know, help desk, and you might want to shorten it. So, the timing, you know, can change. But there's some major guidelines that I think are best practices that work. So I would definitely count on those holidays if they were big enough to participate in the break or pausing of the timing. But you're right, there are many applications that are campaign management software that have built-in detection. I was going to ask you as you were talking about that, it came to mind. I ran some experiments for a while in regard to the days of the week. And I found, yeah, I found typically Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday were generally slightly higher response rates, but not significant enough to where I would never send a message on Monday and Friday. There was just like a 10%, 12% increase. Interestingly enough, Sundays I had the highest response rate.

Yeah. Yeah.

You found that too?

Well, we never tried that, unfortunately. I once did a post on LinkedIn about the Sunday message, actually, and had a little questionnaire about it, if people would really use it. And on the one hand, people could say, oh my God, this is a horrible company. They make you work on Sundays, you know. But if you, if you do it well enough, that might actually also be maybe a cool thing to do. Just saying, like, I know you are super busy, you probably won't read it on Mondays because you will be extremely busy. The rest of the week will be, oh, you know, and Fridays you just want to go off work, and Saturday you make your groceries, and Sunday you can sit back, relax, and you know, scroll through the internet. And this is why I'm just taking that time, because this is so important to me. And this is why I want to make sure this pops up in your inbox, right? It can work, you know, if you phrase it a bit like this, you know, if you just sent out randomly a message, right? Yeah, yeah, it might come across as, oh my Oh my God, hustle, hustle, hustle. This is a slave.

Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah, it's any other workday for me. No, no. The message that was sent was, "Pardon for interrupting your weekend, but I'm sending this because I didn't want to interrupt your workday." That's one. Or another one was, "I wanted to catch you before you got really busy during the week." You know, it even said, you know, don't feel like you have to respond today. I know it's your day off.

I love those messages, like the signatures, like this time I'm sending this might work for me, you know, not for any other person. Don't feel like you have to respond straight away. And I know this might seem as a weird time of the day, but it actually works for me. And it might even seem more inclusive because that's what a lot of working moms just to send it, you know, after they—

after hours.

Yeah, after hours when they put their babies to bed, they've played with them, you know, and they still have to, you know, keep up with work a little bit more. Yeah, so that, that might work as well. But we all know that you can schedule your messages anyhow, even with, you know, Google. Yeah. Stuff with you.

Delay send.

Yeah, yeah, delay send. So that should be obvious, you know.

But yeah, but Saturday, nope. I— the, the, the worst decline was Saturday. I had 23% fewer responses categorically on Saturday than any other day.

I would do this. Yeah, totally.

It was definitely that. So higher on Sunday, very much lower on Saturday. And then Monday and Friday, not the best days, but certainly not, especially if it's during the middle of the sequence. So, your first email maybe goes out on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. But if it's your second or third and it happens to land on a Friday, it doesn't impact it.

No, no, no, no. You really have to think this through. I totally agree.

What about the time of the day? Have you noticed any patterns in timing with the sending?

God, it really depends, honestly, so much. There's no perfect time. It also depends on what position this is, you know. Does this person work at a desk, you know? Do they have a regular day? Um, and just ask yourself, when would you, you know, like to, to see such a message? And then answer instantly. Would that be, you know, in the mornings or after hours or at lunchtime, you know? 'When you got some spare minutes.' You know, just ask yourself and put yourself in the person's shoes, you know.

And then especially considering their time zone, because there might be a difference in time zone that you're not aware of. And it makes it a less convenient time for them. So sure, what would you like to, you know, when would you like to receive the message in your time translated to theirs?

And, but you know, like those modern email campaigning tools, they do have heat maps and they really show you what works when and they send it out intelligently, you know, which helps you definitely, you know. So this is why I'm actually honestly a very big fan of those email campaigning tools because they just do help you and, you know, perfect, perfect your choice. Is that a word?

Perfect. Yeah.

Perfect your outreach.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's quite a bit to think about. Thank you so much for joining us today. I always ask my guests 2 questions before we end the show. The first one of those is who should be our next guest?

Oh my God. I've sort of thought about this because I feel like everyone has been on the show who has to be on the show. Like you have the who.

So many good people that I don't know.

I was like really starstruck a little bit. Just gotta lick the screen, be like, oh, go Shelley.

Okay. I really, there's so many people I don't know that I've made some very good discoveries.

So I would honestly just recommend someone who is a little bit more introvert, but who's amazing. And it's Ben Carricki. He's from Finland. And he has worked with me at Scandaid. And he's now with AIO. It's a Berlin startup, and he's the talent sourcer there. He is just plain amazing. He's just such, such, such a brain. So when I hired him, he was a little bit of a newbie in that sphere. And I asked him, Would you mind reading Jan Tegtse's book? You know, the big one, the really, really big one, the 800 pages book before the next interview. And he was like, sure. And he did actually. I could really tell he did. It was just plain crazy. He's a big brain. And then we wrote a book together because we had so many stuff we would try out and create a cheat sheet out of it. And eventually, when I was on maternity leave and I was a little bit bored, I was like, why don't we just write a book together, you know, about it? And we did. And it was such a fun time, honestly. Um, and there's a lot of things in there, you know, um, what we tried and how those messages actually looked like, because we really wanted to show people not only how to create great messages, but what really worked for us, you know, with examples, with very, very concrete examples. And that's what we published then on Amazon. He's an amazing guy. He's so lovely. He's one of the most lovely people I know and smartest, one of the smartest sorcerers. And he always tries new ways, and he's such a tool nerd.

Okay, I like that already.

Yeah, he's lovely.

All right. Well, I'm going to reach out. I might need a little boost of an introduction from you, but that's a really good recommendation. Thank you. And then, the last question is I would like to have you leave our audience with something to think about deeply, like a thought-provoking question. Not an idea that you want to put into their head, but something that they should contemplate for themselves. Self-discovery, basically. Nope. Looks like we froze. All right, folks, uh, looks like we have a frozen connection here, so I guess we're, we're gonna have to get that deep thought, um, some other time. Sorry about that, apologies. And, uh, well, we'll see you back here. We have Megan Whittington coming back on July— oh, there we go. Is she back? Nope, she's not back.

Hello.

Hey, welcome back.

Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I don't know why, but my internet just cut itself off. Or I don't know, maybe, maybe my daughter, she put— she pulled the plug. She's such a sneaky one.

Blame the kids. Okay, I like it.

Okay, okay. You called me about your question though, like a deep thought, right?

Um, yeah, something to mull over?

Well, what you should always think about is that when you're doing an outreach, you're stepping into someone else's world uninvited. And what you should always ask yourself is, what traces do you want to leave there? You know, and because it's a lot about the recruiter, me, me, me, what I want from them. And there is a little thought about what situation they are currently in, no empathy, no real interest. So how do you, how can you spark this and really also leave maybe someone smiling, you know, or happy with hearing out and not just annoyed and be like, oh, another recruiter message, it's spam, but rather something that also adds value to someone's day or knowledge or about development, you know. And that might not necessarily just be a new job, but also be just maybe a cool article you've just read, you know, that's super, super thought-provoking for the industry or the position they're working in, right. So if I would want to maybe recruit you, shall we? You know, I would maybe send you the coolest, newest interview article that I've read on AI and outreach, for example, you know, and be like, hey, also, you might want to have a look at this. I know you're a brain and want to, you know, maybe have a, have a thought about this. This is also what we're thinking about at the moment at our company.

Great. That's really good feedback. I appreciate that. Think about how you're interrupting their day. So what do you want?

Yeah, exactly.

Deep thought. Deep thought. Okay. Well, thank you very much, folks. Everybody, thank you for coming. We will see you next week, as I was saying before, with Megan Whittington on July 26th, our next guest. And until then, please be kind to yourselves.