How I Used Content Creation & Email Marketing To Find A New Job
After working in the recruitment industry for 3 years I’ve gleaned some useful information from a job seeker’s perspective:
Job boards, cover letters, and continual resume tweaking to cold apply for jobs in large volumes is a colossal waste of your time.*
* For specialized roles in most industries, at least.
I’ve been employed by four different full-time employers in my working career. Three of those jobs I had known someone in the company and was referred. Your network is stronger than any resume you beef up. So obviously, spend more time sleuthing through your LinkedIn, Facebook, Angel List, and your phones contact list, if only to get an idea of what companies your contacts work at.
Which leads me into the approach I took as I looked into my next role: using email marketing, content creation, and my operational mindset to create a human-touch-at-scale opportunity creating machine.
This isn’t new or revolutionary. I by no means invented this approach, but I refined it pretty efficiently to maximize your time as an active candidate. I met a ton of new folks at companies I’ve had my eye on for years.
With the job market being flooded with candidates, and HR/recruitment teams being stretched to capacity, the competition to be seen through normal job board and direct website applications is not a good use of your time. This isn’t even including the robots that will filter out your resume before a human even reads it (some companies implement this tactic as their first line of defense). As most futurists predict: we’re all going to lose to robots. But why start now!? There has to be other options.
Like going directly to the human who is going to be your future manager.
One of the many “first rules” of sales (depending on which made up sales “thought leader” you listen to): always put yourself in front of the decision maker. The same goes for looking for a job. Recruiters and HR reps are not the decision makers; they’re the gatekeepers. All good sales folks know how to bypass these folks.
Yes, you’ll probably need to chat with HR/Recruitment team as a first line of defense, but if you get in front of the decision maker first, and they forward your email to HR/Recruitment team saying “vet this person”, well, the decision is already done. You’re getting a first round interview.
This is an integral part of the process I’ve been testing. So let’s jump into the high-level approach and then dive into the details.
Personalized-content-creating-sales-marketing-drip-campaign-to-create-job-opportunities (I like this name. Easy to remember, easily brand-able. PS Don’t hire me to name your products):
- Make a list of all the companies you’d be interested in working for
- Identify which of these companies have an open role which you’d be a good fit for (separate those with an open job role for you, and those without one)
- Find the hiring manager who you think would be your boss (or at least is a high-level in the department you’d work for). Depending on the size of the company (<50 people) find the CEO/COO
- Using a few chrome tools & apps, find the work emails for these folks*
- Create an engaging 4 to 5 email sequence campaign (this is the fun part)
- Use an amazing Gmail tool to send out the sequence over the course of 10–12 days*
- Clear your calendar, because you’re going to be scheduling a lot of phone calls.
* You may need to cough up some money for some sourcing & email tools, and potentially LinkedIn premium if you find yourself hitting the limit. LinkedIn does have 30 day trials of Premium, which should be MORE than enough time to put together the full list of companies and the right decision makers.
It’s very straightforward; nothing revolutionary. But it’s unique in this context. It’s a back door that’s rarely used by job seekers and it catches the eye of hiring managers and exec’s as they’re used to being confronted by vetted candidates through their traditional recruitment process. It shows initiative, it gives insight to who you are on a personal level, and puts your name and face in their brain. It also shows you understand email marketing, and proves you know how to communicate effectively.
The best part of this is you can send these emails to companies where they may not even be hiring for your specific role, or hiring at all. It’s not unheard of for companies to create positions for people who they find valuable enough to not let them get away. Rule of thumb: don’t let their job board dictate whether to reach out to them or not!
This process takes less time than it does to continually tweak your resume, cover letter, and answer random questions on job applications only to get robot emails saying they’ve “received your resume and will DILIGENTLY read through it and PERSONALLY get back to you”… *Cue the crickets.*
This process will also give you big brother level insight on who is reading your emails, downloading your resume, and clicking your links. That way you can frame replies and call folks out on their lack of responsiveness.
Step 1: Find Companies & Setup Your Spreadsheet
Create a copy of this Google Spreadsheet
This is where you will be living for the next few weeks/months on your job hunt.
The first two tabs will be where you’ll be spending the bulk of your time. They key differentiation here is the split between companies who have roles open you’d be a fit for and those companies who don’t have a role open currently, but you’d love to work for. The reasoning for this separation is the different content you’ll be sending between these two.
Don’t let a company’s lack of job availability deter you from this exercise. Hiring managers and owners of companies won’t let good talent walk away and will actively try to create positions. It may not be immediate, and it may not happen at all, but again, being on their radar is the best long-term bet you can make using this process. Relationship building with this process is infinitesimally better for your personal brand than being caught in the application-denied HR department.
You now have merit to send a request to connect on LinkedIn with the hiring manager/founder of the company where before you were just some stranger creeping on their profile.
Back to the headings in the spreadsheet. They’re all straight forward. Each row will be dedicated to a company & individual contact. Go ahead and list multiple positions at companies if there’s a fit, but only engage with one role and one person at a company at a time. Don’t shotgun blast this out to everyone; coworkers talk to one another and it’s not a great experience when you’re sending a carbon copy of an email to multiple people. Not authentic, it’s spammy, and you’ll be disregarded most likely.
Remember, the whole premise of this is being able to bring a personal touch introducing you, a normal functioning human, to each hiring manager individually. You want to make them feel special, empowered, and giving them the feeling to be receptive to your cold email about how you can help grow their team/company.
Step 2: Find The Right People
Once you’ve completed the list of companies you’d like to work for, and found all the roles available, you’re ready to find the folks who you’d be interviewing in front of and potentially those who’d be your boss.
If you’ve found companies on Angel List, at the bottom of each company page, you’ll find the founders and employees. You have unlimited views on Angel List, so start there before jumping to LinkedIn. Put their first, last, and job title on the line item that corresponds to their company in the Google spreadsheet.
Now, copy and paste their name into Google followed up with their company name, ie “John Smith salesforce” and the first result should be their LinkedIn profile. If you want to save your LinkedIn views, you can just copy and paste their LI profile URL right from Google search results without having to open their profile. You might even be able to get their email address without having to go on their profile. More on that in a bit.
If you can’t find the right person on Angel List, or from the company page on LinkedIn, open up LinkedIn’s advanced search and type in a few keywords to help narrow it down.
Keywords:
Company: [ name of company you’re looking for ] (make sure to select CURRENT company, or else you’ll get results for folks who may have previously worked at the company you’re looking for.
Title: [ exec/director/vp level of department you’re looking to work in] i.e. “vp marketing”, “sales manager” “cfo”
Location: [ geo location of where the specific office you’re looking to work at is in ]
Using just these simple filters will bring the results to a manageable number where you can scroll through the job titles of folks at the company and identify who would be the right fit to eventually email. Go ahead and put more than one person in the spreadsheet if you aren’t quite sure just yet.
Step 3: Find Their Contact Details
Before you just get trigger happy finding the people at each company, learn how to find their contact details so you can:
- Find the right people
- Find their contact info
Complete both steps in one fell swoop as opposed to having to double back and go through your list to just find emails. If you do it that way, you’ll double your LinkedIn profile views and generally just waste your time. Find the right person, and their contact details at the same time.
There’s numerous ways to find company email addresses, we’ll start with the easiest ways first: Chrome plugins. Feel free to download any/all of these. Most have tons of free credits to begin with so you don’t need to pay.
Chrome Plugins to Download:
ContactOut
Nymeria
Hunter.io
RocketReach
HolaConnect
GetEmail
These are magical little plugin’s that scrape the web looking for contact details. The basic premise is that when you’re on the LinkedIn profile of the person you want to find their email, you click on one of the plugins, and it’ll bring up the email(s) if they can be found and verified. You’ll have pretty good luck finding contact details with these.
A second option is using the web app version of Rocket Reach. This is a useful tool if you don’t want to click on the users LinkedIn profile from when you did a Google search on them. All you need is just the URL for their profile, paste it in Rocket Reach, and it’ll spit out any contact details it may have found.
One thing to notice is these tools will give you the domain of the email as a preview, so if you see emails like @hotmail.com or @gmail.com they are not their work emails, so unless you don’t want to email their personal addresses, don’t click on them or else you’ll be charged a credit on that tool. Credits are your unemployed currency, you gotta save them every chance you can!
If all of these tools don’t yield anything, you’ve still got a chance to find their work email using your gut and…guessing.
Most companies have generic email formatting:
john@company.com
john.smith@company.com
jsmith@company.com
smithj@company.com
js@company.com
With the formats in mind, there are tools you can use to test the validity of the email address. Using these variations, copy and paste them into tools such as:
Brite Verify
Hunter
Email Validator
These aren’t a perfect science, but they’ll give you an idea of if the server accepted a ping for that email address, or if it’s not valid at all. An educated guess is better than nothing at all. Worst case? The email bounces back and you get to try a different one.
Boom, your Google spreadsheet is now taking shape. Tons of companies, jobs, real human names and emails. You’re now primed and ready to start…writing about yourself!
Step 4: Creating The Email Content
Before jumping into writing emails, making them sound all business’y and suave, answer this question:
You’re emailing a stranger who is potentially going to be your boss. What kind of first impression do you want to have with them? (straight business, light-hearted, fun and engaging?)
The reason you need to think about this is because it will dictate the sequence. This is a unique approach to getting a job, so your tone should be unique as well. If you’re a person who treats business completely separate from your personal life, perhaps your tone and content is filled with buzzwords, your accolades, and how damn amazing you are at “business.”
If you’re light hearted/laid back, you might rely more on how fun of a coworker you’d be. How you’d bring a unique energy to your coworkers and team. You have some wittiness to you in real life that you want on display in your emails.
Whatever the case is, write these emails exactly like how you’d write in your notebook to which only you would read. Seriously. Writing words that you THINK your audience would like is for the birds in this project. You’re writing about yourself.
It’s awkward, I know. But this is exactly like an in-person interview. You talk to 5 people, back to back, just talking about yourself, over and over. This is your chance to really control the narrative up front.
High Level View of My Email Campaign:
Email #1: Intro email
Goal: Introduce yourself by being an advocate of their product/company/service.
Email #2: Introduce your value
Goal: Give some insight to your past successes that you think would translate into helping them grow their product/company/service
Email #3: Introduce your personality
Goal: Provide them a detail about how you’d be as a co-worker with your colleagues using a previous example of boosting morale, extracurricular, team building, etc. at other companies.
Email #4: Recognize their silence, but still sell yourself
Goal: Admit you’re bombarding them with emails, but provide them what you think your biggest asset is and hone it in on a real life, personalized use case for their business.
Email #5: Politely tell them you’ll stop emailing them
Goal: Leave a lasting impact by swallowing some pride and admitting a bit of defeat, but leaving the door open for later communication.
An entire series could be written about writing the content. I’m more than happy to share the actual templates I sent if you want to email me. If this gets some traction I will release them in a more plug-and-play type way for folks to use.
If you don’t have enough content for 5 emails, the minimum should be 3, and if it’s 3 they shouldn’t be more than 2.5 to 3 paragraphs each. Anything more than 3 means you obviously have enough content/thoughts to create a separate email.
But for now, here are the important things to keep in mind when crafting your sequence:
Subject Lines
Don’t write the job title you want, don’t say you just applied, don’t be boring. Put some personality into it. Some examples that showed success for me (I’ll show stats at the bottom to prove I’m not a bull shit artist):
“It’s me, your next hire!”
“{{first name}}, when do I start for {{company}}?”
“I’m finally throwing my hat in the ring”
“I can start tomorrow”
Get weird. Be straight to the point. If you ever come up with a subject line and you say to yourself “that seems inappropriate/unprofessional” immediately send it. Don’t think twice. Who gives a shit. The worst thing that happens is they open it and now they know your name. Oh wait, that’s exactly what we want them to do.
Call To Action
At the end of each email (last sentence/paragraph) needs to have some form of request/action for the reader. The whole point is for them to make a decision (obviously a ‘yes’ decision). Some CTA’s I found successful:
“If you have 10 minutes Thursday morning at 8:15, I’d love to chat about how I’d make an immediate impact on your marketing team”
“If you have a need for caffeine between the hours of 8AM-11AM Monday-Friday, will you allow me to buy one for you?”
“I get it, you are up to your ears in work. Would you send this email to your recruitment team so I can climb the correct ladder to eventually chat with you?”
Engagement is the big one here. We don’t want our emails just hitting their inbox, being read, then discarded.
P.S.
Every single email you send should have a P.S. in it! Our brains are wired to potentially not read a wall of text, but we will skip to the end and read a small sentence. This sentence should be something personal about you. If they didn’t read the entire email, the PS should actually sell them on what the point of the email was, so they actually go back and give you, a human, a few minutes of their day.
Here are a few things I used in my PS’s:
- A picture of my dog
- Who my childhood heroes were
- A relevant blog post I wrote that ties into the content I wrote
- A random GIF
- Some success/failure/piece of feedback about their product/service
Again, be unorthodox. The person reading the email is much more receptive to reading your email if they know an actual individual sent it. The point of these emails is to give them that human touch feeling, in a scale-able fashion.
Customization
This one is important. It’s also hard to explain without using an example. So let’s do that real quick.
“Hi {{first_name}},
Apologies for the unsolicited email, but I’ve been working for six years straight preparing myself to officially throw my hat in the ring to become a {{job_title}} at {{company}}.
[ CUSTOM CONTENT TO {{COMPANY}} HERE ]
[ this is where the rest of your static content will go ]
[Static Call to Action here ]
Cheers,
[ your_name ]
[Dynamic or Static P.S. goes here]”
With the email automation tool you’ll be using (which I’ll explain in a second) you have the ability to go into each email for each individual and customize it. So, once you’ve uploaded everything into the tool you can review each email exactly how the reader will view it, and change whatever you’d like.
There should be a sentence or piece of paragraph that is “customized” to the person you’re emailing. This shows authenticity and doesn’t feel automated. This is important. It may take a bit of time for the first few emails, but you’ll get the hang of it fast after writing a few, especially since these are companies you’ve know about firsthand. You can then start to mix and match for similar company types.
Step 5: Setting Up The Email Sending Machine
It’s a Gmail plugin. It’s the best thing that’s ever graced the internet if you live in Gmail. It makes your emails aesthetically pleasing, allows you to introduce cool add-on’s in your emails, shows you analytics on emails you send. Automates emails. Schedules emails, etc. etc.
Note: To get the most out of it, you’ll want to get the Premium version, on a monthly basis which is $65 a month. In my opinion, worth it.
I’m not going to provide a step by step walk through on how to use it. They do a great job of it here. And specifically here for the example I’m walking you through.
First thing to do is to copy and paste the pretty email templates you created and make them into “Templates” within MixMax. If you have a few different versions of them where you’d like to test different subject lines, different content, CTA’s, etc. then go ahead and create a new template for each version. Make sure the formatting looks good, and you can then turn them into Sequences, which is where the automation comes into play.
There is a tab in the Google doc example I posted at the beginning of this article titled “CSV”. This ties into MixMax. Example:
You have a list of 10 contacts you’re looking to send out as your first test batch. Copy and paste all of the rows data into Row 2 of the CSV tab. Click ‘File’, ‘Download As’ ‘CSV’.
If all of the fields in your sheet are filled out, you can then insert all of that data into the content of your emails for massive customization (first name, company name, job title, location, etc.). Feel free to add way more data fields in the sheet to hyper-personalize your emails. Go crazy.
You can schedule them however you’d like. I have found that sending the first email on Tuesday morning, the second on Thursday, and the third one on Sunday night yielded positive results. Emails 4 and 5 I spaced out to 3 days apart. You’ll want to do your own testing here.
Another great thing about MixMax? It ties into your calendar, so you can include a link as a Call To Action to the person you’re emailing and say “Schedule 15 minutes in my calendar, whenever works for you” and MixMax will mark it off in your calendar, as well as the person scheduling a chat with you.
A few best practices before sending off emails out into the internets:
- Do small batches, especially when starting out. Maybe 7–10 people for each template you’re trying. Look at open/reply rates after a few days, change up subject lines/content if needed, and then send a new batch.
- For the very first campaign or two, use up your “C Team” companies/contacts which aren’t your A or B companies you want to work for. The rationale being that if your message falls flat, well, you didn’t REALLY want to work for them as much as the other ones anyway. A low impact test.
- Proof read every single email before clicking send. You can toggle between the previews, and even send previews to your email.
Again, MixMax is straightforward to use and they have great support. If you want to reach out to me I’m happy to chat through your campaign/answer any questions.
Results From My Campaigns
I took a couple snapshots of a few campaigns I ran. Note, do not use the naming convention I did. I was lazy and unorganized when I started this since it was all just a giant test. Best practice is taxonomy like this:
[Sequence Name — Template Name — Email #]
Example:
[Tech Co’s w/ Jobs — Template A — Email #1]
[Tech Co’s w/o Jobs — Template B — Email #3]
That way when it comes time to look at stats comparing Templated content in A and B you’ll see that the subject line in A may yielded a better open rate, but the content in B converted higher reply rates. Perhaps combining the two templates into a new template C would have the best results. All of these template names should be in the Google/Word doc you used to write up all the content so it’s easy to reference from MixMax results.
* ‘Downloaded’ means that they downloaded my resume, which I attached to a few emails.
* ‘Clicked’ means they clicked on a link I had put in the email. Usually a link to a specific blog post or my LinkedIn profile.
Note that the reply rates might seem low, but instead of replying, they were forwarded to the HR/Recruitment team to deal with. Who then reached out to me to schedule a time to chat.
Stats From All My Campaigns:
Companies w/ Jobs: 98
Contacts @ companies w/ jobs: 71
Emails Recipients w/ job: 43
Companies w/o jobs: 49
Contacts @ companies w/o jobs: 44
Emails Recipients w/o job: 26
Total Email Recipients: 69
Intro Calls Booked: 19
Conversion Rate Email → Interview: 28%
I didn’t even use all the companies I had initially found on my list, and didn’t even send emails to all the contacts/emails I found. I still had a lot of companies and contacts I could have tapped into.
Conclusion
If you enjoy learning, and you have some time on your hands (hello unemployment!), this is a great way to enhance your skillset to email marketing automation and content creation. Plus you learn a lot about yourself.
After writing a ton of email sequences about myself (which I’ve never done before because all the emails I ever wrote have been about the company/product/service I’m working on) I learned a lot about what I actually want to do professionally. When you’re thinking back about your successes, failures, and what you did/didn’t like about them, it helps narrow down your search criteria, which in the end helps you pursue the narrative you want to create when setting up discussions with prospective employers.
I met with exec’s of companies who I’d never thought I’d get time with. I made ~60+ new LinkedIn connections that weren’t just random; I actually had an email trail and history to look back on with them. I was told that while I wasn’t a fit currently, they thoroughly enjoyed the silly things I wrote in my emails.
I also learned within a single email reply from some folks that I dodged a bullet from having to work there.
As the dust has settled I looked back on the hours I spent writing, researching, and configuring and can honestly say it was all worth it. I’m happy to help you out personally if you’re thinking of doing this, or you need help refining companies to research, content to write, etc. I enjoy it.
Email me: rory.john.obrien@gmail.com
