To learn more about how to modify your outreach campaigns in Dover, please check out this article.
Tips
Keep sentences short, simple and concise. Emails are read on mobile — think of the scroll test: if they have to scroll more than twice, they’re probably not reading the entire email. Get the important information in first.
Focus on the you vs. the I or we. The goal of an initial recruiting email is solely to get candidates on the phone. You’ll have an opportunity to sell them on the company during the interview process. Leave your mission statement to 1-2 sentences and spend the rest of the message focusing on the role.
How much impact will they have?
How much autonomy and ownership do you offer?
What tech stack do you use?
Do you have any out-of-the-box benefits?
What are some projects they’ll work on in the first six months?
Who will they be working alongside?
Use flattery and personalization (eg. "I'm looking to build out an amazing team of backend engineers, and I think you'd be a great fit based on your background.")
Links to add:
Linkedin profile of the person sending the email
the job description for the role
the company website
Have a direct call to action (CTA) ("Can you hop on a call within the next few days?" is much better than "Are you free to chat?")
Variable content
Our outreach editor supports the following variable content tokens:
{{first_name}}{{job_name}}{{sender_name}}{{personalized_content}}{{current_company_name}}(candidate's){{previous_company_name}}(candidate's){{school_name}}(candidate's)
❓ What's "{{personalized_content}}?"
{{PERSONALIZED_CONTENT}} is an internal tag that we use at Dover. On every email, it’ll pull relevant information from their online profiles, and construct a personalized, custom sentence using AI and GPT-3. We’ve found that emails with custom sentences increase interest rates by up to 30%.
Subject lines
Subject lines are important! It’s how candidates decide whether to open your email. Your subject lines determine your open rate.
The standard outreach we generate comes with the following subject line:
❓ {{FIRST_NAME}} - {{ROLE_TITLE}} at {{COMPANY_NAME}}?
This subject line is shown to have a high open rate since it mentions candidates by name.
You can further optimize your subject line by including anything that is exciting about the role or eye-catching to the candidate up front.
Is it a first-of role? If this is a first role, it’s great to describe it as a “founding” role, since that’s more attractive to candidates.
⭐ {{FIRST_NAME}} - founding designer at Acme?
⭐ Build the engineering team at Acme
Mission-driven: If your startup is solving problems like climate change, mental health, or social issues that’s a great way to capture mission-driven candidates’ attention
🌎 {{FIRST_NAME}}, reduce carbon emissions with Acme
♻️ Help us tackle food waste?
🧠 Build the future of mental healthcare at Acme Health
Well-known investor: If you’re backed by a top-tier investor that is a household name, you can highlight that up front. Note, most candidates don’t know a lot of investors so use this sparingly!
⭐ {{FIRST_NAME}} <> Acme (Sequoia, A16Z-backed)
🚀 Come join our crypto rocketship, funded by Dragonfly & Coinbase!
⭐ BDR role at Y Combinator startup
Niche Technologies: If you use a specific or niche technology, you can mention that up front.
⭐ Elixir role at Acme Love Rust?
⭐ Come work with us!
⭐ Build next-gen blockchain systems
Location: If the role is in person, or remote, you can highlight that up front.
☀️ Exciting role at seed startup - based in Miami
🏙 SWE role at Acme (NYC-based)
Emojis & Fun: Though a riskier attempt, you could use Dover’s A/B testing feature to try out different subject lines.
⭐ Could this be you?
🚀 Come join our rocketship
👋 Hello from Acme - interested in open roles?
Feel free to mix & match subject lines or combine them!
Example emails
Highlight the Salary Range for Compensation-Driven Roles (Sales, High Comp)
Good for comp-driven roles, such as Sales (AE, BDR, SDR), or roles where the comp is higher than the standard range for a role at this stage of seniority/company funding.
We have seen this 2x interest rate in some cases
💡 Subject: John - BDR position at ACME? ($99K OTE)
Hey John!
My name is Scott, and I'm a co-founder of ACME, the first data-driven QA solution to help eng and product teams ship code faster and more confidently. We’re looking for talented BDRs to build out our sales team, and I think your background would be a great fit. {{PERSONALIZED_CONTENT}}
We’ve raised $14M in funding and have doubled our team in the last four months. Some of our customers include Stripe, Uber and Coinbase.
We’re 100% remote, true flexible hours, and offer competitive salaries ($99K OTE).
Are you open to a 30 min call to learn more? More details on the position here.
Best,
Scott
Use Bullet Points for High Demand Roles (Eng, PM, PMM)
Great for personas that have a high demand (engineers across all stacks, product manager, product marketing)
1.35x’d the interest rate across low interest rate jobs
💡 Hi John,
My name is Nick, VP of Engineering at ACME. {{PERSONALIZED_CONTENT}} I thought you’d be a great fit to join our team as a backend engineer.
Here's a bit more about us and this opportunity:
ACME empowers engineers to create the perfect security and privacy workflows for their teams. You'd be building code to help other engineers (including yourself!) do their job more efficiently.
We recently raised $9M in Series A funding led by Amplify Partners. Our angel investors also include former Google CISO Gerhard Eschelbeck, Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath and Jason Warner, the CTO of GitHub.
Being an early engineering hire means: the opportunity to make a huge impact on the product and company culture, and tons of ownership and autonomy over your work.
Work with a diverse and geographically distributed team that loves working with customers, collaborating on tough technical problems, and posting pictures of our pets, kids, and fresh haircuts in Slack.
Our tech stack is Python (and we're happy to get you up to speed).
If you're interested, would you have 30 minutes in the next week to chat?
Best,
Nick
Standard template for Lower Demand Roles (Creative, Marketing, Design)
Great for personas that don’t have a high demand (in other words, there are more jobs than candidates) (ie: creative, marketing, product design)
💡 Hi John,
I'm Scott, CTO of ACME, and I'm looking to find some of the best full-stack engineers to grow our current team — I think you'd be an awesome fit. {{PERSONALIZED_CONTENT}}
ACME’s unique data and billing platform enables companies to move more quickly without having to invest in costly teams of platform services and billing engineers. We've raised multiple rounds of funding from world-class investors like Sequoia, Tiger Global, and founders and execs of companies like Segment, Looker, Gitlab, Dropbox, Microsoft, and Google who have experienced the pain we're solving first hand.
As one of our early engineering hires, you'll have an outsized impact on the product and engineering culture as we expand.
Here's a bit more about what it's like to work on the eng team:
Join an experienced team that includes founders who have successfully built and sold startups before (like Dropbox, Clever, and New Relic)
Write meaningful code that will build out our infrastructure as well as a set of platform features to make developing new products faster and safer (aka, make your coworkers move quickly and do the right thing by default)
Tons of growth opportunities as we scale
Our tech stack includes Python, Java, and Typescript
Do you have time to jump on a call with a member of our team in the next few days? I’d love to hear more about your background, your current projects, and your career aspirations…and of course, tell you more about our company.
Best,
Scott