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Sourcing Autopilot
Getting started with Sourcing Autopilot
Getting started with Sourcing Autopilot

Sourcing Autopilot enables you to source candidates while you sleep. Read on to learn how to configure it to meet your hiring needs.

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Written by Customer Support
Updated over a week ago

✨ Receive candidates who match your customized criteria. Dover finds and emails candidates for you, making outbound recruiting completely effortless. ✨

⚙️ How it works

For many roles, sourcing and reaching out to candidates is the most effective way to hire — Sourcing Autopilot can even do this for you automatically with Autosend, saving you valuable time to focus on what matters - closing great candidates.

After a quick calibration and setup process, Dover will identify and contact up to 200 candidates a week.

  1. Dover uses your Criteria to identify great fit candidates. Then, our system can personalize the outreach based on candidates’ experiences and background — a superpower which greatly increases response rates.

  2. Each day that you have Sourcing Autopilot enabled, Dover will add candidates to the outreach queue between 7-10am ET.

  3. If you have Autosend on, you’ll have 24 hours to make changes before outreach is sent out. If you choose to turn off Autosend, the queue will populate, but candidates will not be automatically contacted. To edit outreach, click on the candidate and you can edit the email and Save and send

  4. Candidates who respond to the outreach as interested in the role will be surfaced to you directly in Slack and the Dover App for your review. You can then approve or reject the candidate, and Dover will take action based on how you’ve configured Dover to handing communication and scheduling.


✉️ Sourcing Autopilot: Autosend ON vs OFF

For most users, Dover recommends turning on Autosend. But there are some use cases for turning off Autosend. Learn more below so you can customize Dover to meet your unique hiring needs.

🚀 Autosend ON

Dover finds and emails prospective candidates for you, making outbound recruiting completely effortless. When Sourcing Autopilot has Autosend on, Dover will automatically send personalized outreach to candidates who meet your criteria.


You can complete your setup in less than 5 minutes, tell Dover about your role and what candidates you’re looking for, and Dover will source candidates and send personalized outreach automatically.

✅ On average, Dover jobs with Autosend on receive responses from 5 candidates interested in their role.

❌ On average, Dover jobs with Autosend off receive responses from 1 candidate interested in their role.

❓Why is there a difference? Autosend intelligently calculates the number of candidates to reach out to each week to ensure a steady flow of interested responses every week.

✅ Why you should turn on Autosend:

  • To get responses in today’s hiring market, you have to send a large volume of outreach.

    • Since outbound candidates are not actively looking for new roles, interest rates will be lower. Therefore, your outreach volume should be higher in order to get responses from great candidates.

    • Dover even optimizes email send times to increase your response rates.

  • To stand out from the competition, personalization is key, but hard to do at scale.

    • Dover automatically generates personalized sentences based on a candidates’ public profiles and relevant work experience.

  • Manually sourcing and reviewing resumes is time-consuming and difficult.

    • Through our data and inputs, Dover actively targets candidates when they’re more likely to be looking for a job, and only surfaces profiles for those who have expressed interest in your role.

  • Responding to candidates is time-consuming and tedious, so respond to interested candidates directly through Dover.

    • 👍 If you’re interested in speaking with the candidate, reply in the Dover App

    • 👎 If you’re not interested in speaking with them, no problem! Reply in the App

⛔ Autosend OFF

When Autosend is off, Dover will queue candidates every morning. You will need to manually send outreach to each candidate by clicking ✉️ Queue to send next to each lead. As when Autosend is on, you can edit the personalized outreach or remove candidates from the queue.

There are times when it may make sense to turn off Sourcing Autopilot. Here are a couple common use cases:

  • If you're running a very niche search

  • Outreach is being sent from the CEO and your team wants to ensure that you have more than 24 hours to review candidates and outreach before it's sent

💡 When Autosend if OFF, there will up to 75 candidates in the Queue. Be sure to send outreach to candidates or remove them to receive new candidates.

Update the Criteria

Dover can be configured to target to the types of candidates you’d like to hire for your role. Learn how to configure your 🔍 Sourcing Criteria in this article. You can have multiple searches active at the same time. If multiple searches are active, candidates will be targeted who meet the criteria for all active searches.

💡 When you make changes to your searches, you will have the option to remove candidates who no longer pass your criteria from your Candidates Queue.


Set up an Outreach Campaign

Dover can be configured to target to the types of candidates you’d like to hire for your role to receive outreach. You can learn more about configuring your searches in this article. You can have multiple searches active at the same time. If multiple searches are active, candidates will be targeted who meet the criteria for any active searches.

Depending on your Dover plan, you can have multiple outreach campaigns active for your role. If multiple campaigns are active, outreach will be split evenly between campaigns. However, you can also assign campaigns to searches.

Assign Outreach Campaigns to a Search

You can assign outreach campaigns to specific searches by following these simple steps:

  1. Click 🔍 Sourcing from the side navigation bar

  2. Select the role from your Active Jobs

  3. Click +Add next to ✉️ Outreach Campaigns underneath an active search

  4. A modal will pop up and you can select existing campaigns (you can select multiple campaigns) OR

  5. You can click +Create New create a new campaign, fill out the information and click Submit

  6. Click Save in the bottom corner to lock in your changes.


❓ FAQ

❓How many outreach emails can Dover send per week?

For most Dover jobs, you should expect to see 20-30 queued for your role candidates every day.* For customers on premium plans, Dover lets you customize the target number of candidates to contact per week, which will impact the number of interested candidates you can review for each role.

To update your outreach volume:

  1. Go to your ⚙️ Overview for the job

  2. Under Sourcing Autopilot, click the Configure dropdown and select Settings

  3. Select how many interested candidates you would like to receive per week from the dropdown and click Submit

❗ *Dover does not guarantee contacting the exact number of people we mention in the configurations. However, we hit that number a vast majority of the time and are continuing to decrease the number of cases where we do not hit this number.

❓How do I modify my outreach campaign and email personalization?

Dover offers several ways to customize your email messaging:

  1. You can modify your outreach campaign by following the steps outlined in this article.

  2. You can also customize outreach to individual leads in the Candidates view under Queued. Click on the candidate to customize the outreach message. If you have Autosend on, you will have 24 hours to edit outreach messaging.

❓Can I modify the time of day that outreach emails are queued?

Yes! When you customize outreach to individual leads in the Candidates view, click on the candidate and select your preferred Send time from the dropdown options, and click Save to queue your message to be sent at that time.

❓How can I prevent Dover from sending outreach to friends or people in my network?

Great question! You can add exclusions to Dover to ensure that your contacts do not receive outreach. You and your team can upload contacts in the Dover App https://app.dover.io/setup/company/exclusions, and Dover will exclude those contacts from receiving outreach.

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