Strip Mining Candidates

Strip mining candidates is what you do when you send out great gobs of unsolicited email (spam) in order to get responses from a fractional percentage.

The question you have to ask is what happens to your brand in the minds of the 99.95% who do not respond?
Papa John Sumser

Strip mining candidates. Gee, I love that sound. It's what I've always wanted to do. And, here's how you protect your brand from negative feelings about spam.

You hire a recruiter to send out the "spam". She takes the flack. I'd say about 10% percent of the people respond and very few get cranky. Why? Because when the job is suitable, even the most snooty passive candidate will deign to give you a call.

In fact, if the email is well targetted, it acts as a general marketing campaign. Yeah, they think you're a spammer and yeah they learn that you operate in their field -- which is of interest, again, even to the dudes who think they're too good for the likes of you.

The only concern in this kind of mass mailing is that it ends up being automatically routed to a junk file.

Hat Tip: Ami G

Comments

[Zoe Goldring]

Oh my dear Recruiting Animal - I must squarely disagree with you on two points.

First, you are still at risk of hurting your brand when your company's name becomes associated with these mass emails; either intentially when the recruiter uses it or indirectly when people research and find out where they are coming from.

Secondly, this ill conceived tactic continues to downgrade the profession of recruiting and makes it more difficult for even great recruiters to do their jobs. People already feel like recruiters are the sleezy salesmen of our profession. Why are we continuing to perpetuate these attitudes?

So you see, not only are you hurting your employment brand, but you are also damaging the recruiting industry brand.

[Recruiting Animal]

Dear, sweet, pregnant Moongal, I so appreciate your detailed dissent from my point of view. God forbid that I, The Recruiting Animal should damage the good name of recruiting. But if, indeed, recruiting doesn't have a good name it's not because some targetted emails go out to all of the people in a specific field.

It's because some recruiters are rude and pushy when they get you on the phone and after. Let's do a survey of people who receive unsolicited descriptions of jobs in their field and see if they aren't in fact happy to have a clue about what's going on in the world outside their little cubicles.

Regards, Your Online Friend,