One of the most complex part of recruiting is finding the balance between personalization and automation.

You want to add automation to your workflow to save optimize some time right? But you need to keep a personalized touch to maximize engagement.

Up until recently, when thinking about automation, I was asking myself “How can I save more time?” which led me to add a bunch of tools to my workflow.

Then I started asking myself “How can I optimize time?” instead.

It's a slight change in semantics that actually changed my entire approach 🙃

Leading me to have a more sober approach:

I’ve analyzed my entire workflow. I’ve looked into parts I was willing to automate and parts I was not. I’ve found a balance between automation and personalization, and let's dare call it that way: my ideal recruitment workflow 👉

Let's deep dive

1. Identifying adequate people to contact

There's a whole section dedicated to sourcing people in this Notion so I won't ramble about it here.

Instead, I'll focus on a trick I’ve recently discovered: collaborate (a lot) with your team to iterate on your sourcing ICP (Ideal Candidate Profile)

💡Tricks & Tips

I use folkX (chrome extension) to log all my sourcing leads into folk.

Then I can ping my colleagues on folk asking them for feedback to make sure the sourcing approach is leaning toward the right direction.

2. Finding out more information

The second step of my workflow is about enriching contact informations.

I'm looking for:

• contact information to maximise engagement like ****Linkedin URL, email, Twitter account etc. ⚒️ Github hack, ContactOut, AmazingHiring.

• contextual information to personnalise my message like social media profiles, personal blogs and projects for instance

  ⚒️ ContactOut, AmazingHiring

3. Crafting a personalized approach

💭 Personal thought: I won't recommend to automate entire campaigns, especially if you're not able to add a touch of personnalisation because:

1. it can be dangerous: you'll contact a much larger volume of persons without filtering enough thus your Linkedin access can be restricted, email considered as spam etc.

2. it surely isn't friendly for the person you're reaching out, nor to you. You'll see how fun it is to get response from person reacting to your jokes, questions or whatever personal touch you've added to your message.

   I've always loved finding key personalized elements to add to a message (even if sometimes it fails, but that's a story for another day 😄).

💡Tricks & Tips

I’ve added a Custom Attribute text field into folk that I use to write my personalized approach.

This way I can navigate on a profile on Linkedin, Twitter or else and once I’ve found the inspiration I just need to click on folkX (chrome extension) to start crafting my approach.

4. Sending messages and follow-ups

Building your own messaging workflow isn't an easy task. I'd say the key here is to find the right balance between automation and personalization.

💡Tricks & Tips

Finding your own balance will take time and many iterations. It depends on lots of variables like your approach, your tone of voice, the information you are sharing, the personas you are targeting.

Keep track of your engagement metrics, do A/B testing to see which message, which sequence generates the most engagement.