New Release: Tools to write better messages
We've been working to understand what makes an Engineer respond positively to a message you send. Some messages get a 70%+ positive response rate, but low-performing messages can be 3x lower than this....Why?
We've interviewed Engineers, analysed and read 1000's of messages. We used the findings to build features that help you write better messages and get more responses. This post will cover what we discovered and the features we've released.
What we discovered
Engineers said:
- They were more likely to respond to personalised messages that they felt were written directly to them.
- They were more likely to respond to conversational, shorter messages
- Long copy/paste style messages put them off
- Messages that looked like job specs put them off
- Messages that included information about something they were interested in were more likely to get responses
The data said:
- Messages that were between 300-600 characters got a positive response rate between 10-20% higher than messages outside this range. Messages over 900 characters performed very badly
- Messages that used personalised variables got a 13% higher response rate (but only 16% of our users personalise messages 😧)
What we've built
We're super excited about a 4 major changes we've released to help you write better messages:
1. Candidate interests
To get a candidate interested, you need to know what they are interested in. You'll now see an "interests" section on a candidate's profile. The categories for this section are: Skills, Industries, Company Size and Funding Stage.
2. Criteria in common & things to address
Once you select the position you wish to message a candidate about in Steams, you'll instantly see what criteria your position and company have in common with the candidate in "In common". If there are things that don't match (eg. salary, remote working preference, Visa requirements) you'll see this in "To address".
Use this information, combined with the information you have on candidate interests, to write personalised opening lines to candidates with the least possible effort. Eg.
"Hey Louis, Your experience at Google looks super impressive and I saw you're looking for a senior React position that offers flexible remote work.. that's us! Our salary bracket is a bit lower than what you've listed but we have a really competitive share options scheme that might make up for it 😊"
3. Character counter
Messages between 300-600 characters get a higher positive response rate. We've added a character counter that changes colour when you're insde or outside the recommended length of a message (Green is good 😊, red is bad 😞).
4. Better educational content
We've enhanced our Community content to give you more resources on how to write better messages. This includes examples available within the Templates page, and the 4 Community resources below:
Coming soon:
With part 1 complete, we now move onto part 2. Part 2 will bring you:
- Variables highlighted in your messages before you send to help you use Variables with confidence
- Your Positive Response Rate from Active candidates visible when you're writing a message to help you benchmark the results you're getting from your messages.
We hope these features will help make it easy for you to send messages that get positive responses from the Engineers on cord, and also help to improve the overall Engineer experience too ✌️