Lessons from the Wolf Pack is an ongoing series of recruitment advice articles taken from, or inspired by, situations and events observed during our phone coaching sessions with recruitment consultants making real, live calls to win business and find candidates. This is advice directly from the recruitment front lines!

Lessons from the Wolf Pack #4

How To Supercharge Your Email Efficiency

So a change of topic this week, instead of looking at phone work I'm going to cover one of the other things that recruiters do a lot of ... sending emails.

I know that doesn't sound too exciting but not everything is; sometimes things are simply important.

Also think about this - you only have a finite amount of time during a day so if you can make writing emails more efficient wouldn't it make sense to do it?

Time saved can then be spent finding more candidates, bringing in new clients and generally doing stuff that directly brings you in billings.

So if you fancy saving yourself some time and making yourself a more efficient consultant read on ...

How to Instantly Save Time With Your Emails

Key Principle - Stop writing your emails out each time you send them.

The reality is that recruiters send the same or very similar emails out on a daily basis. To increase efficiency what you would be wise to do would be to set up a template email that you can instantly bring up and only needs customising.

That's my first recommendation and ALL recruiters would benefit from some standard email templates regardless of how they do it.

To help further I'm going to outline below what I believe is the easiest way to do this in Outlook 2010 and also share a list of the most common emails you might want to create templates for.

The Most Efficient Way to Create an Email Template in Outlook 2010

The problem with using an actual email template in Outlook 2010 is that it takes about five mouse clicks to bring up the template each time you want to use it, which frankly isn't efficient.

So instead let's get the same result in a different way which will enable you to create your chosen email in a single click!

Four very simple steps ... 

Step One

Open Outlook and look across the ribbon at the top of the screen that contains commands until you find Quick Steps and click on the down arrow - screen shot below

Note - you could also just click on Create New to achieve the same effect - I'm doing it the long way because in the future if you want to edit your template emails you need to click on Manage Quick Steps which is accessed via the above.

Step Two

You will then have two choices and you want to click on New Quick Step and then New E-Mail To ... - screen shot below

Step Three

As this is the first time you have created this particular Quick Step you get the following dialogue box. You can rename the Quick Step to something memorable as indicated by the red box - I'm going to call it

"Cand Int F Up" which stands for "Candidate Interview Follow Up"

this is an email to send to candidates after they have been interviewed by you to ensure they have your contact details, thank them for their time and remind them to email you back with reference and referral information.

After putting in a short, but memorable name, click on OPTIONS

Step Four

Enter the Subject line for the email - the text shown is an example only

In the TEXT box - type or copy in the text you want to be in the email. If your Outlook is already set up to automatically add an email signature to outgoing email then DO NOT add an email signature in here only the main body of the text.

You can format the text in any fashion you like although it's not possible to attach a document.

Click Save when finished. And that's it!

Conclusion

Look at the Quick Steps box now and you will see your new template email in there and ready to use. Simply click on it to create a new email!If you want to make it even smarter then at Step Four add text in the Tooltip text box so that when you hover your mouse over the name of the email further text comes up to confirm which one it is. 

The menu box at Step Four has other options as well but I want to keep this article as simple as possible so I will leave it here but obviously have a click around and see what else you can do.

Using the above you can create any number of instant email templates ... which brings us on to which ones would be good to add?

Which Emails To Pre-Write?

You probably have a good idea of the emails that you send regularly but here are five that are common ones:

1. After interview with you (the consultant)
2. After someone has accepted your LinkedIn invitation
3. When you failed to reach a candidate you want to interview / speak with the first time
4. After speaking with a new decision maker to follow up with company information
5. Asking a decision maker when would be good to speak with them to take a verbal reference

Why The Above Is Better Than Putting Draft Email Text Into Word

Those of you who currently using pre-written email template content will probably be cutting and pasting from a Word document. You can do that and it's fast to set up but it isn't as efficient because you have to come out of Outlook and go into Word, find the right document and then find the right bit to cut and paste.

With computer use any action that requires you to come out of one program and into another and then back again is inherently inefficient. You can do it this way but it isn't as good as the method above.

Summary

Every week I witness consultants write the same, or very similar, emails to their clients from scratch. It's inefficient.

Take half an hour out of your day, draft up the most common emails that you use - I guarantee that within the week you will have made your time back and then some!

More Recruitment Advice Next Week

That's all the Lessons from the Wolf Pack this week - tune in next Wednesday for more advice from the recruitment front lines. 

Until next time; be successful

Stephen Hart

Owner, Edenchanges

Originally Posted

This was originally posted about two minutes earlier on edenchanges.com where you can also find a lot of other recruitment, sales and related articles.

Edenchanges