#27: How to Write Recruiting Emails Candidates Want to Read

Brandon Jeffs:
00:01

My average email open rate right now is, like, 86% across my sequences. Write to an audience of 1 is my biggest piece of copywriting advice.

Rhona Pierce:
00:11

Brandon Jeffs is a TA leader who has spent a decade mastering the art of candidate relationships. With experience building teams at high growth tech startups, his approach to recruiting breaks every conventional rule. When you say write to an audience of 1 When

Brandon Jeffs:
00:28

I'm writing to somebody, it's often like, alright, Chrome window 1 with my email, Chrome window 2 with their LinkedIn profile. And I, like, legit try to write in my own voice as if I'm, like, talking to them.

Rhona Pierce:
00:40

But in an industry racing towards automation, Brandon has discovered something counterintuitive about human connection.

Brandon Jeffs:
00:48

It's crazy that I'm saying this as we go into 2025, but for me, what I'm seeing in real life is the biggest pattern disruptor is just by being authentic.

Rhona Pierce:
01:02

Do you have specific rules of where the candidate journey you present each one of those, or is it a mix?

Brandon Jeffs:
01:10

It really depends. One of the things I've been doing is bringing a lot of the information asynchronously upfront.

Rhona Pierce:
01:17

With recruiting tools becoming more sophisticated by the day, Brandon's insights challenge everything we think we know about candidate nurturing. What role do you see, like, candidate nurturing playing in the future of work?

Brandon Jeffs:
01:34

We don't have an insight in the future, but I think this is one of those moments where we might be overshooting.

Rhona Pierce:
02:36

Hey, Brandon. I'm so excited to have you today on the show.

Brandon Jeffs:
02:40

Hey. What's up, Rhona? I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.

Rhona Pierce:
02:43

Of course. So we're talking about a topic that I absolutely love, but I wanna, like, go back to your early days as a recruiter. Right? What was your first, like, moment that made you, like, realize the importance of relationships with candidates?

Brandon Jeffs:
03:02

Yeah. When I think back so this is actually year 10 for me that I'm heading into recruiting. And in my twenties, I, like a lot of folks, took the advice and followed my passion. I thought I was gonna work in restaurants and hotels. And what I found is I was doing, like, management, doing a lot of hiring, training teams, and I really enjoyed that.

Brandon Jeffs:
03:25

So I segued to a corporate career in recruiting. And for me, my earliest TA role was very much community based hiring. And what that meant for me in my role was I was hiring folks in the grocery industry. These are people that had they didn't have digital profiles online, so I had to go boots on the ground, knock on doors. So to me, the early days was out of necessity.

Brandon Jeffs:
03:50

If I was going to be effective, it was all rooted in community building and handshakes in the most most authentic and analog way, which is literally just by showing up.

Rhona Pierce:
04:02

Cool. Love it. So let's make sure we're all on the same page about what candidate nurturing means. So what does it mean to you to nurture a candidate?

Brandon Jeffs:
04:13

For me, when I think about candidate nurturing, it's creating bespoke experiences for candidates that influence human behavior. If at the end of the day, a recruiter is trying to get to a handshake, yes, and an acceptance for a role, nurturing that relationship has to be aligned to that individual's motivations and their personality. So, like, I try to bring my personality into the recruitment process. I work with early stage startups, so a lot of the stuff that I do doesn't scale. And that's why I enjoy it, and that's why I've gone super granular in my career as a recruiter.

Brandon Jeffs:
04:48

I'll always be like a tactical recruiter. I think there's tremendous value from working requisitions. So when I think about what it actually means to me, it's really focused on what is driving that individual. And sometimes you can apply pattern matching, but for me, I like to stay humble and stay focused on the person that I'm in front of instead of thinking like, okay. I need a 100 of the p these types of folks.

Rhona Pierce:
05:11

Has that definition evolved for you over time?

Brandon Jeffs:
05:15

Yeah. For sure. I, a couple years back, created like a mission statement, and it's empowering the candidate employer relationship in the future of work. And that's evolved now to the employee employer relationship as I've moved into a people and talent role building an entire people function. And when I think about that candidate nurturing piece, that's the how.

Brandon Jeffs:
05:41

How do I empower that employee or candidate relationship? And to me, it's all about those motions, that authenticity, being genuine, being transparent, and just being myself.

Rhona Pierce:
05:54

Love it. Love it. What advice would you give to recruiters who are overwhelmed, rightfully so, really, and feel like they don't have time to nurture candidates?

Brandon Jeffs:
06:08

Recruiting is a high velocity function. It's one of the reasons I love it. And there's probably a heated debate about is recruiting sales or not. And I think folks can go back and forth on this. There are a lot of similarities, but, fundamentally, the daily motions are very similar, and it's that high sense of urgency, velocity, get stuff done.

Brandon Jeffs:
06:32

So my biggest piece of advice for any recruiter out there or even a sales rep who doesn't think they have enough time to nurture something is to slow down and to pause, think a little bit more strategically about how they can deliver more value in the connection for their prospect. So tactical advice, work in sprints, time box yourself. We tend to overestimate what we can get done in a day and underestimate what we can get done in a year. I don't know who said that, but it's one of those, like, tech bro mantras that has stayed with me. So timebox yourself.

Brandon Jeffs:
07:09

Be like a master of your own domain. We often have more time than we think we do, and you can find 15 minutes anywhere in your day. I think if you can break your work chunks down into something that's digestible that you can sprint at a high velocity in, you don't have to do, like, an 8 or 10, like, full day high velocity. But if you can find, like, little blips of 2, 3 x productivity, that's where you'll see those impacts in your work and the results when it comes to placing candidates. Another piece of advice I have is super quickly that when you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else.

Brandon Jeffs:
07:51

A mentor once told me this, and it reframed how I was taking meetings, reaching out to candidates. And from a recruiting perspective, that really optimized my output at the top of the funnel.

Rhona Pierce:
08:02

So as someone who comes from the tech world, I'm a former software engineer and project manager, I understand and a 100% fully believe in the working in sprints and time boxing. But for folks who are listening who maybe aren't that familiar with it, can you give an example of kind of, like, what does working in the sprint mean to you? How does that look?

Brandon Jeffs:
08:23

Yeah. Totally. I think for me, from a daily perspective, it could be, alright. Morning coffee. I'm gonna do 2 hours of sourcing.

Brandon Jeffs:
08:34

Then I'm gonna have my blocks of candidate screens throughout the day, and then I'm going to have an afternoon session of ATS candidate communication cleanup and scheduling. So knowing what I'm doing each day helps remove the cognitive lift of thinking about what I'm going to do. And then from a requisition level, I always reverse engineer everything when I'm raising a wreck. How long is it gonna take us to fill this position on average? What does the data say?

Brandon Jeffs:
09:07

Can we beat that? Do we need to beat that? What are the drivers? And then backdating through that life cycle of the requisition from the estimated time in seat date to have those milestones and communicating them to a hiring manager. So from a, like, sourcing and recruiting workflow perspective, I think about it in, like, 2 week sprints for a live rec.

Brandon Jeffs:
09:31

If I get a rec that launches today, I can build pipe and present x amount of candidates by this time. That means the hiring manager will be having 1st round screens this time. Here's our estimated pass through rates. That means in wave 1, we're going to have x amount of candidates. And while you're screening in week 2 hiring manager, I'm sourcing cohort number 2 of candidates to present to you based on the feedback you fine tune in week 2.

Brandon Jeffs:
09:59

And then from there, it's reverse engineering the pipeline for those outreach demographics to understand, okay. How much output do I need to put into sourcing in order to get the results I'm looking for? If you were to do all of this as an exercise, I'm not a math person. I learned this on the job. The estimates I could come up with are probably not going to have too far off a degree of variance from what the data will tell you, and good recruiters taught me this.

Rhona Pierce:
10:29

Yep. Yes. Yes. Yes. So let's say we're people are sold on it.

Rhona Pierce:
10:34

Right? They only have about 15 minutes a day to dedicate to nurturing. What would you say is the main thing they should focus on?

Brandon Jeffs:
10:43

If someone had 15 minutes a day, the number one priority would be to map the candidate journey, leveraging the types of tools that you have in your stack, identifying the touch points, looking at the candidate experience as if they were a customer, and how are you gonna influence the behaviors at each stage. I think in 15 minutes, you can create a communication map with automation for the touch points, the emails, the calls that you need to communicate with the candidate in order to get to a yes. So if you had 15 minutes, I would do that.

Rhona Pierce:
11:21

So something like, okay. I have 15 minutes. Obviously, the first time you set everything up, it's gonna be more than 15 minutes. But okay. Now I'm maintaining the figure that I've set up, the workflow that I've set up.

Rhona Pierce:
11:33

I have 50 minutes. Today, I'm gonna focus on the people that are in the, I don't know, hiring manager stage. That's where I have one touch point to them. Is that kind of like what you mean? Take it.

Rhona Pierce:
11:46

Yeah.

Brandon Jeffs:
11:47

A 100%. And optimizing that yield ratio at the top of the funnel. So this means being more precise as sourcing recruiters and recruiters and talent partners when we're working with the hiring manager. Set ambitious goals for yourself. And instead of, like, a 45% pass through rate, make it a 60 to 75% pass through rate for yourself and the hiring manager.

Brandon Jeffs:
12:13

So if you break down 15 minutes a day, that means maybe instead of 10 screens as a recruiter, maybe you book 6 because you know those 6 are gonna be super high quality. And then if you spend 2 minutes per those 6 doing deeper research on that individual, when you go into the meeting, you'll be able to extract more motivation from them. You'll be able to build that bond with the candidate and pick up on some of those post hire outcome qualities that you're looking to integrate into the recruitment workflow. So be more precise.

Rhona Pierce:
12:45

It's truly a mindset shift, I think, and I don't know if you agree from what we're mostly thought to do in recruiting because it's always about more, more, more. You have to do more screens, more candidates. You have to talk to more people. But what I found and sounds like you too, it's like really if you get more strategic, more precise, and you get better people, you actually speak to less, but do way better as far as results.

Brandon Jeffs:
13:09

Oh, a 100%. I mean, at the end of the day, recruiters from a first principles thinking are getting to a handshake. So when I approach a rec, it's like, how do I just do this efficiently and and get to a yes and find the right people? I think a lot of us get to a point in our career too where we have a great candidate bench just in our network, but it goes back to those daily rhythms and always being on and always sourcing. There's also this idea of, like, the difference between pipelining and sourcing.

Brandon Jeffs:
13:42

It's just those daily rhythms that you get into as a habit. And for me, that's why recruiting is like a calling. I think all recruiters should be sourcing, and there are ways to build that community so that you can pluck folks and pick up on their motivations and their skill sets more than just like a resume submission through a rec. I think when we zoom out, often recruiting is time boxed into 30, 45, 60 days time to fill, but the hardest factor to influence in recruiting is time. So you might have somebody that you've connected with, and 6 months later, they're a perfect fit, or maybe there's headcount you can bring forward because you picked up on a great candidate in the market who's looking then.

Brandon Jeffs:
14:24

So that's how I think about it.

Rhona Pierce:
14:26

What's your take on how the ideal frequency of staying in contact with passive candidates?

Brandon Jeffs:
14:34

There's no one size fits all solution, and passive candidates can be defined very loosely. I would like to think that, like, my entire network of folks. And then if my network has a connection to your network, that's an extension. Now we're talking about, like, algorithmic reach, especially when we're using tools like LinkedIn. For example, I've had a privilege to work with some really amazing, like, exited startup founders and startup, like, early startup hires that I just stay in touch with.

Brandon Jeffs:
15:07

And there's this one guy in particular, he and I just vibe. And, like, I'm not working a wreck that has anything to do with his background, and I haven't in months. But I know that just the way this person shows up online is really authentic, and it allows me to connect with that person. So if I have a role that comes across the desk, like, of course, he's on the shortlist. So that's how I think about frequency is fine tuning my algorithm, having the most interesting high leverage candidates in my network surfaced early and often so that I can chime in and showcase my personality.

Brandon Jeffs:
15:40

I can be a little bit out there sometimes, especially on LinkedIn, but I find it really helps be being memorable to folks, especially if they are like an executive, and I know it's gonna be a tough search. Like, if I can just represent myself better and more authentic, then maybe I'll be memorable to a candidate when the time comes for me to actually approach them with a job that I think might be aligned with their motivations and skills.

Rhona Pierce:
16:04

Doesn't it happen to you that because you keep top of mind for people, they sometimes come to you or bring you people?

Brandon Jeffs:
16:14

This is most prevalent in the recruiter for recruiter space. I kinda have a policy where it's like, if a wreck hits my algorithm, my news feed, or somebody approaches me with a wreck and it's like, I know somebody that'd be perfect for it, like, I'm not gonna try and chase some arbitrary bill rate and chase a buck. I am far more interested in the long term investment of that relationship, and that's how I try to differentiate myself. Like, I've gone out on my own in in the past. I work in house now.

Brandon Jeffs:
16:42

So now I'm like, I just punt things to recruiters in my network that might be looking. But the recruiter for recruiter example is one that is an interesting light switch moment for me because there was a time where I was like, oh, I wanna be an r for r recruiter. This sounds awesome. I love recruiting other recruiters. But now it's like, I just wanna be friends with all the recruiters that are doing stuff in our space, and the best way I know how to do that is by demonstrating value.

Brandon Jeffs:
17:08

So I do that in a few different ways, but also, like, candidate trading. I mean, if a recruiter tosses me a candidate, I'm gonna pay it forward either back to that person or to the next one.

Rhona Pierce:
17:20

I love that. The reason why I love recruiting is because of all the relationships, and there's the relationship with candidates, with hiring managers, with other recruiters. It's just really truly a people business. So I wanna chat a bit about your newsletter for candidates. I've heard that you're really good at this.

Rhona Pierce:
17:41

What, like, sparked the idea of having a newsletter for candidates?

Brandon Jeffs:
17:45

So this is really interesting, and this is not the first time it's happened. I'm not the sole operator. I'm not the founder of TLDR. This is probably the 3rd or 4th time where I've worked at an early stage company directly with a founder where maybe it's just the way I show up online that people have have thought it's me, which is really humbling. I mean, I wish I had founder equity.

Brandon Jeffs:
18:07

But when it comes to the, newsletter you're talking about so I work for a company called TLDR. It's tldr.tech. We are one of the the largest newsletters in the world. We cater to a highly technical audience. Most of our subscribers, we have 5,000,000 of them, are software engineers.

Brandon Jeffs:
18:27

And so when it comes to the content that TLDR curates, it's actually a collective of newsletters. So we are not a publisher in the traditional sense. We're not journalism. It's like news from people in tech for people in tech. And what that allows is knowledge sharing and a great source of truth and an email that somebody can open knowing they're gonna get exceptional value for what's going on in the world of tech from other folks that are founders, engineers, r and d developers, like true researchers that have, you know, published or founded companies on the backbone of this.

Brandon Jeffs:
19:08

And then on the reverse side of it, that means we have first party data on 5,000,000 of best engineers in the world. So when it comes to building our own team and growing as we scale, we're bootstrapped, we're profitable, we're flywheeling revenue, we're gonna 3 x revenue this year. It's crazy. The founder, Dan Nee, has a fascinating story, but it's all rooted in Internet culture. And I think it goes back to how we connect with candidates in an authentic way that just focuses on delivering value to them.

Rhona Pierce:
19:34

So when you yourself have had to hire engineers for your company, Have you leveraged those connections of those subscribers that you have for your newsletter?

Brandon Jeffs:
19:48

We run a very, very lean team. I think Jason Lemkin would be shook if he knew our revenue per per employee. So the short way to answer that is yes.

Rhona Pierce:
20:00

Amazing. So maybe not that formal newsletter, but have you ever used I know lots of tools out there have ways of creating different types of, like, email campaigns and drip campaigns for candidates. Have you leveraged those?

Brandon Jeffs:
20:17

Yeah. A 100%. So I'm a newsletter, email die hard. I actually started my career as a journalism intern, like, as an editorial intern. I was working on a newsroom, publishing a blog, OG WordPress.

Brandon Jeffs:
20:33

And one thing that's been fascinating over time for both b two b and consumer brands is email is incredibly valuable. That's why every time you log on to a consumer website, they wanna give you 10% off their average basket size in exchange for your email address. It's always worth it to them. During the 20 tens, we got super excited about the capabilities of social media for driving revenue. But at the end of the day, email has come out on top.

Brandon Jeffs:
21:03

So as a recruiter, I remember specifically back in 2018 using Smart Recruiter's newsletter. I had a fantastic director of recruiting, Beth Wolf. Shout out to Beth Wolf. I would not be here without you, Beth. And she gave me, like, full keys to the kingdom to run, like, a nurture campaign from one of those, like, talent community requisition openings.

Brandon Jeffs:
21:26

And SmartRecruiters had a drag and drop email template builder, which was awesome. So each month, we'd put out, like, a little hiring newsletter, and it was really scrappy. And I was, like, building stuff in Canva. We would do open houses at the office. So that's how it started.

Brandon Jeffs:
21:43

It evolves. I actually have been a marketer as well. I ran a customer loyalty program to an audience of 1,300,000 shoppers for a publicly traded grocery store. And I think that really honed my email skills and diving into more of that, like, AB testing and then using enterprise software tools for managing those types of email programs at volume. So I've always been huge on email itself.

Brandon Jeffs:
22:10

The time came to that I approached Dan at tldr and hit him up with a cold email. I said, like, hey. This this sounds cool. And we started jamming, and the rest is history. Here we are.

Rhona Pierce:
22:22

Amazing. What's been your, like, biggest learning about what really makes candidates actually open emails?

Brandon Jeffs:
22:30

Write to an audience of 1 is my biggest piece of copywriting advice. But if you're specifically asking about how to open an email, I think, like, my average email open rate right now is, like, 86% across my sequences. It's keeping it simple. 5 years ago, I would have told you put an emoji in the subject line, and that, like, spikes open rates in the twenties for a consumer brand. So I think, like, being able to test things and being curious, but write to an audience of 1 and keep it super simple.

Brandon Jeffs:
23:01

Like, if I'm inboxing a prospective candidate about a job, I, like, literally just say, like, the job. Like, people can't not open it.

Rhona Pierce:
23:11

So that's amazing. When you say write to an audience of 1, I believe I understand what you're saying, but I wanna make sure everyone listening does. So does that mean just, like, think of 1 person and write to them?

Brandon Jeffs:
23:25

Yeah. It kinda goes back to this idea that a lot of lifestyle brands do around developing a persona. So when I'm writing to somebody, it's often like, alright. Chrome window 1 with my email, Chrome window 2 with their LinkedIn profile. And I, like, legit try to write in my own voice as if I'm, like, talking to them.

Brandon Jeffs:
23:45

And, like, sometimes that's like, hey. What's up? Or yo. Or, like, any type of vernacular I use in my speech. When it comes to email and any type of copywriting right now, what we're seeing is that we're all inundated with words on a screen.

Brandon Jeffs:
24:02

It's just a varying screen size. We go from iPhone to laptop to television, back to our iPhone to iPad to Kindle. Like, that's my day. It's so sad. So when it comes to the content, it's about pattern disruption.

Brandon Jeffs:
24:19

And it's crazy that I'm saying this as we go into 2025. But for me, what I'm seeing in real life is the biggest pattern disruptor is just by being authentic and communicating with people through those devices the same way I would on the street in a verbal conversation.

Rhona Pierce:
24:39

How do you take that philosophy of audience of 1 when you're not necessarily writing to 1 person? Right? You're you're not okay. You don't have their LinkedIn profile. This is your nurture campaign.

Rhona Pierce:
24:50

You for whatever reason, they're in your pipeline and you're nurturing them, sending them a, hey, what's up type of email. How do you take that philosophy and put it in that? There's probably a

Brandon Jeffs:
25:01

lot of folks out there that are mastering the newsletter space that have these amazing personal brands. So I try to just see what other people are doing and mirror it. That's my biggest piece of advice there. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, stopped opening a lot of them just because I've run out of time, but there are a few that I open pretty much every time. And some of that comes down to personal connection with the author.

Brandon Jeffs:
25:31

So I know that, like, when I read them, I'm hearing their voice, or it's somebody who is, like, an online creator. And because they're taking a multimedia approach, they're able to bridge that gap of proximity and relationship building because you might be watching them on a TikTok, and then you might see a YouTube video. You might hear them on a podcast, and the next thing you know, they're in their inbox, and you're able to bridge that vulnerability, that connection, that intimacy. I think that's what great brand builders are doing right now.

Rhona Pierce:
26:05

And on a on a tactical level, does this mean that when you send these campaign emails, you send them directly from your email, not like a generic recruiting at TLDR.

Brandon Jeffs:
26:16

Yes. So my nurture campaigns right now are, like, my playbook for the last 4 years has been typically a 3 sequence drip on a 7 day cadence. And emails 23 are like, hey. Did you get this? And email 3 is like, interested?

Brandon Jeffs:
26:33

So keeping it super small, that to me yields the best results. That's something that doesn't scale. I know when you're thinking about, like, creating these types of nurture campaigns at an enterprise software company, there's just too much paper pushing and policy and procedure and approvals and standardization in order to optimize for, like, basis point yields from the bottom line that you can't do that kind of thing. I've also sent, like, on behalf of messages before, if I'm working with a founder and I'm outreaching software engineers, sometimes there's a little bit more equity coming from the founder and, like, pretending to be the founder. That's just, like, the way it is now.

Brandon Jeffs:
27:14

And I think some candidates know and some candidates don't know that, but, ultimately, it's hard to prove. And, ultimately, if it's a great email and a strong value proposition, it's low risk for the candidate. But I always leaned out from OBO type of sequences just because I wanna present as myself, and I don't wanna have to have that cognitive load later of, like, oh, wait. Is this person I'm talking to from my sequence or the founder's sequence? So I don't like to backtrack often, so it really comes down to just finding my voice, finding a playbook that works, AB testing the copy, AB testing the subject lines, but we talked about subject lines earlier, and that that seems to be working.

Brandon Jeffs:
27:57

So for me, it's all about, like, getting to that 40, 50% reply rate.

Rhona Pierce:
28:02

Cool. And we've talked about you've mentioned AB testing and experiments and things like that. Is there any experiment that you've run that, like, totally flopped?

Brandon Jeffs:
28:12

Oh, this is a good one. I'm a terrible copy editor. This goes back to my days in the newsroom. I remember I published an article once, and I was covering an Olympic figure skating event. And I, like, listed the wrong gold like, the wrong color medal that a certain athlete had received.

Brandon Jeffs:
28:34

And I learned then at, like, 21 years old, like, the process for correcting that in a newsroom. So that's probably, like, my biggest mistake, like, publishing in a newspaper for, like, a Hearst newspaper the wrong information. So fact checking. But when I think about it from a recruiting lens, the only thing that has been a flop is over indexing on it to deliver results. Newsletter, nurture campaigns, email campaigns to your database of folks in your recs should be one arrow in the quiver.

Brandon Jeffs:
29:13

I think when it comes to outreaching candidates, particularly in early stage startups, it's really focusing on getting net new into the pipeline. A lot of companies can be successful sourcing from their ATS at scale, particularly if they're leveraging Evergreen Recs and they have an incredible brand. But for the work that I'm doing on a daily basis, it's net new.

Rhona Pierce:
29:37

Cool. I always like to ask about, like, big flops and and things like that in people's careers and it, like, I didn't actually remember this one when I was planning this episode, but as you were talking and it has nothing to do with having the wrong metal color, but I remembered I was testing something out with a nurture with a drip campaign, and I chose the wrong template for I had segmented into, like, my top people that I wanted to come to about the the role. I sent the template for rejection emails to the people I was just Oh, yeah.

Brandon Jeffs:
30:12

Yeah. For sure.

Rhona Pierce:
30:14

To to, nurture. Oh my gosh. I still

Brandon Jeffs:
30:18

have those If you haven't done that, like, you're not a real recruiter. If you haven't accidentally told a candidate, like, okay. Bye. I love you. You're not a real can recruiter.

Brandon Jeffs:
30:29

One of the things actually as you say that that I think about that I've messed up, this is actually a trick. And I've I was gonna post about this, but it's like a fake mess up. Say I'm, like, sourcing an IC. And one of the thing that I'll do is I'll offer to throw a director or a VP or the people manager into that IC rec. Usually get, like, one of 3 responses.

Brandon Jeffs:
30:51

Response 1 is, like, not looking. Here's 22 or 3 candidates. Sweet. You just got pipe. Number 2 is sometimes, like, I'm I'm a manager.

Brandon Jeffs:
31:00

I'm not an IC. It's like this kinda how dare you tone. It's like, yeah. But you took time to, like, email me back. Okay.

Brandon Jeffs:
31:06

Sweet. You're insecure, and I bet your team probably doesn't wanna work for you. That gives signal to go source that person's team. And then 3rd is they'll probably, like, email you back because you're in their ICP, and they wanna pitch slap and reverse sell you, which is totally fine because, like, in the exec search game, like, it's a long play anyway. So, like, I'll take that call all day.

Brandon Jeffs:
31:26

It's always worth 20 minutes to be try to reverse sold by an executive that I'm always trying to grow my network with. So that's a a fake flop to send a director your IC sequence.

Rhona Pierce:
31:40

Love it. Love that. How do you decide what type of content is worth sharing with your candidate pool?

Brandon Jeffs:
31:48

There are 3 pieces of content that I think are worth sharing with the candidate pool when it comes to recruiting talents. 1, the product story. 2, the growth story. 3, the financial story. Everything I send to the candidate needs to touch on one of those pieces in order to drive the conversion to a yes.

Brandon Jeffs:
32:08

It's just about where in that candidate journey we present that information.

Rhona Pierce:
32:12

Do you have specific rules of where the candidate journey you present each one of those, or is it a mix?

Brandon Jeffs:
32:20

It really depends. Depends on the role if it's technical or nontechnical, depending on what the data says for yield ratios and conversion moments at which stages in the funnel. And it also just comes through doing the work and having these conversations and understanding if it's gonna take, like, a cell call and a screen at the top of the funnel or if I can cover a lot of this in a recruiter screen. One of the things I've been doing as I've taken on more strategic work is in my commitment to the tactical work and being a a recruiting leader that works REX as a senior IC, but also setting the strategy is bringing a lot of the information asynchronously up front. So after a candidate books that first screening call with me, if they're an outbound candidate, I have pretty much like a template that I'll send out with everything I need them to know and want them to know so that they don't have to spend 2 hours doing research.

Brandon Jeffs:
33:15

They've just got an email with, like, 3 or 4 pieces of bread crumbs that tie back to that product growth and financial story.

Rhona Pierce:
33:23

I love that. And I bet you that makes for a really rich and just meaningful conversations with them when it comes to, like, questions because they're not asking, like, the surface level things or, like you said, spending all this time trying to research the company.

Brandon Jeffs:
33:40

Yeah. And it's one thing that I see occasionally too where somebody, like, comes to an interview and they're not prepared. This is usually more for inbound candidates, And I've hired some amazing inbound candidates who are prepared, so this is not a dig at inbound. But I'm surprised by a lot of candidates, particularly in go to market roles that come to a recruiter screen and don't have this type of information and research done already, or they're asking questions about the job descriptions. Like, I take a lot of pride in my job descriptions.

Brandon Jeffs:
34:08

Like, I spend time writing them. So when they ask questions that are, like, in the job description, it's just like a dead giveaway that they're not aligned for the role and, like, we just waste each other's time.

Rhona Pierce:
34:17

Yeah. I've done a lot of, like, startup recruiting as well, and it's it's a different game. You want the person to to want to know about the company and research and things like that. So I totally get that. What's your your tech stack for candidate nurturing?

Brandon Jeffs:
34:36

When it comes to my tech stack for candidate nurturing, I've run a pretty lean stack. I've sandboxed a lot of AI tools in the last 18 months, ChatGPT week 1 user. So it's like, I'm interested in it, but I'm not putting all of my, like, eggs in the AI LLM basket. I think it could be helpful, but one of the things that AI and LLMs are terrible at is personalized outreach. One of the things they are great at is research.

Brandon Jeffs:
35:05

So when I think about, like, the tech I'm using, it's pretty lean. It's like couple of Chrome extensions. It's an applicant tracking system. I like a a Kanban board style ATS, so I can drag and drop, see visually, move fast. So when it comes to nurturing, it's using an email sequence directly from the ATS that's piped directly to the requisition and the job so that I always know, like, my current considerations for active pipeline and my prospects so I can run, retargeting campaigns if that first sequence only yielded a 20% reply rate.

Brandon Jeffs:
35:44

And then in terms of tech stack let's see. Is there anything else I'm forgetting? I'm a Slack, Google Workspace Notion guy. I've built ATSs in Notion, Airtable, and Zapier myself. In the past, Slack integrations are great for working with the hiring manager, especially when you're doing, like, at mentions in interview scorecards to get quick feedback.

Brandon Jeffs:
36:03

My favorite micro metric is time to completed scorecard. If a hiring manager completes a scorecard within, like, 2 hours of an interview, I know that candidate is, like, pretty legit. But if the hiring manager sits on it for a day or 2, it's like, okay. We need to keep working here. They're not a fit.

Brandon Jeffs:
36:17

So that's that's pretty much my stack today. I I love I love a cell phone, and I got my, like, dented iPhone 11. It's cracked. One of the things I've noticed is reschedule more video calls these days, and I've been leaning into this. I've started actually taking more video recruiter screen calls than old school phone calls, but, I love jumping on the phone.

Brandon Jeffs:
36:39

I'll give everybody my phone number. I'll send you silly little TikTok style videos of me working remotely from my house, singing songs, being a goober.

Rhona Pierce:
36:48

Amazing. And you you spoke a bit about automation with Zapier and things like that. Are there any other tools or, like, how do you use that to automate your drip campaigns?

Brandon Jeffs:
37:01

Yeah. So in the applicant tracking system that I'm using, there is like an email sequence tool. So I'll build it out directly in the ATS. I know there's a lot of great applicant tracking systems out there that have evolved. I think about this as, like, the 3rd wave of hiring.

Brandon Jeffs:
37:17

First, it was like paper resumes, scanning resumes, then it were was like larger enterprise ATS systems that were not candidate focused. They weren't built with human centered design in mind. They were often HRIS companies that needed an ATS solution. But now we're in the 3rd wave of hiring where it's human centered design, candidate experience first, heuristics, beautiful UX, beautiful UI, but it also takes into mind the recruiter experience. So I've done things as petty as, like, matching up my tech stack by color.

Brandon Jeffs:
38:00

So there's a lot of great tools out there. I think if you go to a conference, particularly like in HR tech in Vegas, there's tremendous market parity when it comes to buying these tools. I I wanna support my friends. I wanna use bleeding edge technology. But But at the end of the day, like, there's there's a lot of ways to get things done.

Brandon Jeffs:
38:16

I mentioned it earlier in our episode. Like, I have a passion for cooking. I actually hate fancy cooking equipment. Like, give me, like, the gnarliest, like, worst knife in the kitchen. I like a plastic handle knife.

Brandon Jeffs:
38:29

I like a plastic cutting board. I like an old pot that's been around for 20 years. It's about the end product that needs to be polished and and beautiful and wonderful. So maybe that's how I think about my tech stack and and why I like doing stuff with bubblegum and paper clips, but I'd be happy to dive deeper if if you wanna talk specific tools or any give anybody a tutorial. Like, if anybody wants to call me up and be like, yo.

Brandon Jeffs:
38:49

How do I use this Chrome extension? How do I run a bash script against a PEL's leak? Anything you wanna know about getting candidate data and enriching emails and figuring out ways to connect with people is is always a fun conversation.

Rhona Pierce:
39:04

Yeah. No. I I think a lot of the the people that listen to this podcast, I mean, kind of like why I named it throw out the playbook and stuff like that. We don't I always say budget is a trigger word for most people in TA because we hardly ever get any. So we I know I am and the listeners are usually people who are like you doing the most with the least and just using what you know works.

Rhona Pierce:
39:31

I love your your example about your knife and stuff like that. I it was funny. I think I bought an actual set of knives, like, probably 8 or 9 years into my marriage, and it was because my cousin who is a trained chef was coming to visit for Christmas. And I'm like, maybe I shouldn't expect her to cook with my steak knives from Walmart that

Brandon Jeffs:
39:55

I used to cut. No. My I'm with you. Great to hear you have a passion for cooking too.

Rhona Pierce:
40:03

I'm the same way at work with stuff. It's just like, let's just use what's been working, what works. It doesn't have to be the fanciest thing.

Brandon Jeffs:
40:11

Oh, I've got a great example, actually, in my real work today. So leading people and and talent at TLDR, like, we're we're implementing Lattice, actually. And I had built, like, a performance management and OKR framework in Notion, and I told the founder, like, yeah, we could do this this way, bootstrap it, make it work until, like, this milestone where I think we might wanna invest in software. And then, like, I talked to the folks at Lattice, and it's, like, literally a $100 a year per employee. Like, HR tech is so cheap.

Brandon Jeffs:
40:38

My recommendation is, like, go talk to these folks, test tools, hit up the founders, figure out the differences, understand why something doesn't work. I think that's a big piece right now for, like, this second to 3rd wave movement for recruiting tools, particularly in the candidate facing side of it from outreach and scheduling is, like, understanding why something doesn't work. If you're a recruiter and you're getting a candidate drop off or low attendance rate, like, do you know the difference between an API call for a calendar versus a dotICS file? So these questions around curiosity and understanding how our systems serve us is really what dictates the market, not the other way around. Like, don't roll up to HR tech and let some founder, like, you know, tell you how to do something.

Brandon Jeffs:
41:23

Like, be confident, have conviction, test things. It's cheap enough to figure out solutions.

Rhona Pierce:
41:29

I love that. Have candidates ever given you any feedback on your nurturing process? Like, have they what have they appreciated the most about it?

Brandon Jeffs:
41:38

This is something that I actually struggle with. I don't take positive feedback with a lot of absorption. It's nice when I get that message, and in the moment, I'll smile, but, like, I will it'll go one in in one ear and out the other so fast. I actually encourage any new recruiter to create a brag book, like, day 1. Create a file, open it in your iPhone.

Brandon Jeffs:
42:04

Just do something so that on those hard days where you're like, why the heck am I doing this? You can go back and pump yourself up. As a team, as a function of 1, like, I am my own pep rally. I am a little bit extra. I annoy myself most days.

Brandon Jeffs:
42:20

But being able to go back and think of those wins at a very granular level, if we're influencing one person in one of the most important decisions in their lives, which is where they're gonna go to work, that's enough. So this is something I'm actually working on and would love to hear how you do it.

Rhona Pierce:
42:37

I love your advice because I wish I would have started a bradfolder earlier on in my career, and I didn't. When I moved to recruiting, it was such a, like, literally pushed into it from what I was doing. It was so different from being a software engineer and and all of that. And I was I started in leadership of recruiting because I was already in leadership. So it was hard.

Rhona Pierce:
43:03

But, yeah, that's what I do. I keep screenshots, anything anyone has said because like you, I don't remember the good things. But one bad thing, one negative feedback that I remember it detailed for the rest of my life. But the good things, I kind of like don't remember them. So I like to have that for those days when I get the negative feedback because we all get it.

Rhona Pierce:
43:24

I can open my brag folder and literally go through the screenshots and be like, I'm actually good at this. I remember.

Brandon Jeffs:
43:31

You know, it's really funny you say this, Rona, because this morning, I saw this question. You teed this up in, like, the preshow notes, and I saw it last night as I was going to bed. And there was actually a candidate that I remember speaking to a few months back, and he gave me, like, one of those notes that I remember made me feel really good. And then I was like, okay. What is his name?

Brandon Jeffs:
43:50

What is his name? And I was, like, racking my brain as I was falling asleep. And then sure enough today, like, I posted and, like, I just saw it a few minutes ago before we recorded that he liked one of my recent posts. And it's like, I can remember a face, and I try to remember people's names because it's the most important thing about them. But, like, as a recruiter, we see so many names, but I can remember faces.

Brandon Jeffs:
44:09

And it's usually only, like, occasionally where I'll forget somebody's name or not actually be able to thread that needle from a memory perspective. But, like, because of this, because of you prompting this, I'm gonna be able to go pinpoint that and find that person because I actually want to sell a role to them and reengage them for an active wreck I'm working right now. So thank you for making this, like, recruiting happenstance real time for me.

Rhona Pierce:
44:38

Amazing. I love that. As we wrap up, what role do you see, like, candidate nurturing playing in the future of work, like, especially with remote and fractional and just where we live right now?

Brandon Jeffs:
44:55

This is tough because we don't have we don't have insight in the future, but I think this is one of those moments where we might be overshooting the capabilities of AI. I think we're very much moving towards the dead Internet, but we're not going to be there as quickly, I think, as people anticipated. So the short answer is, what does the role it play? What what is the role it plays? Same as it always was.

Brandon Jeffs:
45:29

And one of the things that sets people apart is adding value. Specifically, what do I mean by that? If I work in the exec search space, if I work in the sourcing recruiting space for early stage companies, I have learned that I always have to be pipelining. I can't just open a rack, optimize for application yield ratios, and and get a handshake. Yes.

Brandon Jeffs:
45:52

It's gotta be part of my daily motion, and that's why I'm committed to recruiting. So one of the ways you can do that is, particularly if you're reaching out to an engineering leader, demonstrate value to them. They're getting bombarded with tons of emails each day. Go back to that pattern disruption. Don't be precious about our candidates or introductions you can make.

Brandon Jeffs:
46:14

Put a little sauce on the plate. Leave people wanting more. When it comes to nurturing, it's leaning into the value that we can present for other folks, and maybe it's shipping a candidate or 2. They'll remember you for being generous. There's also nothing wrong with a little quid pro quo when it comes to understanding more of those cold relationships and threading opportunities to add value.

Brandon Jeffs:
46:42

So that's kind of a seller tactic once you get into that that call and have the introduction. If you need to leverage, like, quid pro quo, like, I think it works in respectful ways. So, ultimately, what it comes down to is recruiting is about influencing human behavior, driving connection with other people. If you don't wanna do that, like, there's a million other ways to make a living.

Rhona Pierce:
47:03

I love that. It's true. Anything about candidate nurturing that I didn't ask you that you think is important for listeners to know?

Brandon Jeffs:
47:13

Yeah. Like, you can't spell nurture without you are, so I wanna know what you are doing. Sorry to be a dork, but, like, how do you think about nurturing? Like, it's it's so complex, and I'm I'm really appreciative of us diving in on this.

Rhona Pierce:
47:25

Great question. I I think about it very similar to you. To me, it's all about the relationships, and it's about it's the long game. Just like the way I think about my content as a content creator, it's the same way I've thought about nurturing candidates. It's like like you said, you it's the people that you meet today that you just know, okay.

Rhona Pierce:
47:45

I don't have something for them right now for whatever reason, but I just this person totally fits with either the company I'm working with or the types of companies I like to work with because I know what types of companies I usually work with. So just starting that relationship and, again, giving value. There's been so many times where it's like, oh my gosh. I I don't know. For whatever reason, people write to me when they've had a bad day at work.

Rhona Pierce:
48:12

It's like, can you believe what my manager said? And not in the slimy like, oh, let me slide. Oh, yeah. It's a great time to, like, sweep them up from where they are at, but it's like, what did they say? Do you have 5 minutes?

Rhona Pierce:
48:25

Let's talk about it. How are you gonna reply to that email? Just basic how I would help any of my friends. I do a lot of that, and that has really helped whenever I find a role for them. And it's like, hey, what about this?

Rhona Pierce:
48:39

Even if they're happy at where they're at, because I've listened to them on those off days and because of the relationship that we've built through the years, they always take my calls. They always open my email. So it's very people first approach. And the reason why I do recruiting is because I love people.

Brandon Jeffs:
48:57

100%. I agree with all of that. And that's what's cool about the tools right now being built. And a lot of these, like, 3rd wave of hiring vendors are focused on the recruiter experience. They want our feedback.

Brandon Jeffs:
49:13

Like, Team Taylor does a great job at implementing product feedback in 6 week sprints. They're approachable. It's an elegant product. It looks cool. It's like bubblegum yum yum pink.

Brandon Jeffs:
49:24

So if you're talking about matching up your tech stack and maybe matching your microphone, it's cool to see their evolution as well. They're breaking into the North America market, the US market. They're wildly popular in in Europe. And I know some folks over there and have worked with them, and it's just really cool to see that candidate nurturing component, how they're thinking about employer branding, the modules there. So we're we're on the precipice of some really cool emerging technology, and that's one of the benefits of start up technology and start up tech is, like, you get to sandbox things and try new tools in a way that enterprise solutions can't work as nimbly.

Rhona Pierce:
50:05

Yeah. Oh, and I could talk about team Taylor for hours and hours, but truly as someone that comes from a engineering background, I I was very big on, like, user experience and user testing. And like you said, Team Taylor is really about the, like, recruiter experience and the nurture section in their connect section of their or features of their application are truly built with the recruiter in mind and the candidate in mind, and you can totally see it as with the ease of how you use it and just how easy it is for candidates and also for you. So yeah.

Brandon Jeffs:
50:43

I I love to see it. I think we're we're definitely gonna be in a space where, yes, there's continued market parity, but it really comes down to having the right tool for the job. And I've used a lot of different tools. I wanna use a broad variety of them, and it's also, like, relatively inexpensive. So it's like Yes.

Brandon Jeffs:
51:00

Go try it. Go sandbox it. Go ask a vendor for a sandbox instance.

Rhona Pierce:
51:05

Yeah. You'll be surprised how many times you get that just by asking. So I have loved this conversation. How can listeners get in contact with you?

Brandon Jeffs:
51:15

My number is 720-646-9075. Shoot me a text. Say what up. I'm for real. I I love talking to folks.

Brandon Jeffs:
51:23

I will be speaking at TA Week in San Diego with some friends. Really excited to see the Team Taylor folks out there. We're gonna gonna hang out and do some cool stuff around the employer brand and nurturing space. December 10th, I'll be at the hire easy for recruiters by recruiters conference talking about recruiting in 2025 with clarity and confidence. Shout out to hire easy and the team, Shannon and Daniel.

Brandon Jeffs:
51:49

I run a podcast called the Rebel TA podcast, where we talk with people and talent leaders in the future of work. My content is sometimes a little out there. It might not be for everybody. I'm I'm kind of a goober, but, engage with my contacts. Send me an email.

Brandon Jeffs:
52:03

I love a good email. Love a good text. And then if you are looking for recruiting support, like, happy to connect anybody to the right folks. I've been punting a lot of inbound leads that, like, my own content engine has developed. I run a little strategy firm that I put on hold while we build TLDR.

Brandon Jeffs:
52:18

So, yeah, anyway you wanna get in touch, I'm always down to Jam.

Rhona Pierce:
52:21

I love it, and I can't believe you gave your phone number. That's amazing. That's a first on this podcast. Amazing. Well, thank you so much.

Brandon Jeffs:
52:30

Thanks, Verona. This has been awesome.