Optimizing outreach

Tips from Dover on how to optimize your outreach

Customer Support avatar
Written by Customer Support
Updated over a week ago

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?")

✉️ Editing your Outreach


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.

Examples of Subject lines

  1. 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


  2. 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


  3. 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


  4. 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


  5. 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)


  6. 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?


Personalize your content

Our outreach editor supports editing the following variable content:

  • {{first_name}}

  • {{email_sender_name}}

  • {{personalized_content}}

What is {{personalized_content}}?

{{personalized_content}} is an internal tag that we use at Dover. On outreach emails, it’ll pull relevant information from a candidate's online profiles, and construct personalized, custom sentences using AI and GPT-4. We’ve found that emails with custom sentences increase interest rates by up to 30%.

Examples of personalized content

I wanted to reach out because I saw that you've been at Credit Karma for nearly a year now. It'd also be fun to connect and discuss the dashboarding projects you focused on at Coral.

It looks like you left Google recently, what have you been up to since then? I'd also love to connect and discuss your experience at Target.

Your experience and promotions at VenMo caught my attention. I thought I'd take a minute to intro myself because it also looks like you've been working there for quite a while now.

How are you doing at LinkedIn? I saw that you've been working there for about a year and a half, so I thought I'd reach out. It'd also be fun to connect and find out more about how you measured ROI at CDW.

Examples of outreach 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

Subject: John - Engineering position at ACME? ($99K OTE)

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

Did this answer your question?