Seth Godin’s blog has a very simple guide on how to send a personal email. Yes, we know this is all common sense BUT how often today with all that is going on around us do we forget to do the simple things well.

Seth’s starting point is avoiding being seen as a spammer or worse still having your emails deleted before being read or just plain ignored. Something of course we don’t want to happen with our personal emails or with our “business related messages.”

“The thing is” as Seth points out “email reduces friction. Greedy, lazy organizations have embraced this and tried to figure out how to blast as many emails as they can as cheaply as they can, relying on the law of large numbers. The real law of large numbers is, "using large numbers is against the law."

Seth suggests that we “add some fiction back into our communication”.  He also points out that “to be seen as being personal, the best strategy is to be personal, which is slow and expensive.”

After reading his tips (see below), our thought is that although he is discussing email, much of this advice could apply to our communications and messaging to candidates. Whether it is your response to a candidate email application or the messaging on your career site or even how you use email signature file, Seth’s advice is both a good call to action and a good recruiting mantra.

We will be digging out our very sensible list of “things to do to improve your recruitment communications”  as a follow up to this article.  Why? Do help us all remember that doing as many of the basics as possible delivers a real ROI on our investment in candidate communications.

Seth’s 14 tips are:

1.    Don't send the same email to large numbers of people.
2.    If you have more than a few people to contact, you'll be tempted to copy and paste or mail merge. Don't. You'll get caught. It shows. If it's important enough for someone to read, it's important enough for you to rewrite.
3.    Careful with the salutation. Don't write, "Dear Claudia," if you don't usually write "Dear" at the beginning of all your emails.
4.    Don't mush the salutation together with the rest of the note. If I had a dollar for every email that started, "Joe, When experts come together..." That's not personal. That's lazy merging. See rule 1.
5.    Don't send HTML or pictures. Personal email doesn't, why are you?
6.    Don't talk like a press release. Talk like a person. A person is reading this, so why are you talking like that?
7.    Be short. The purpose of an email is not to sell the person on anything other than writing back. If you don't have a personal, interesting way to start a conversation, don't write.
8.    Don't send an email only when you really need something. That's not personal, that's selfish.
9.    Do you have a sig with a phone number in it? Your phone number? If you don't trust me enough to give me your real phone number, I don't trust you enough to read your mail.
10.    Don't mark your email urgent. Urgent to you is not urgent to me.
11.    Don't lie in your subject line, and don't be cute. You're not clever enough to be cute. Just be honest.
12.    Following up on an impersonal spam email is twice as dumb as sending the first one. Invest the time to do it right the first time.
13.    Anticipated, personal and relevant permission mail will always dramatically outperform greedy short-term spam. I promise.
14.    Just because you have someone's email address doesn't mean you have the right to email them.

This was a question posed today on the UK Recruiter Group on LinkedIn.

Naturally, as RCE will be launching a series of national and international events in 2009, and we will be highlighting and covering other events across the recruitment spectrum (such as Enhance Media’s Online Recruitment 2009 - The Year Ahead Conference on 29 January in London, I felt I had to step up and defend the well run conference, on behalf of all participants.

Ricky Wheeler of Broadbean presented a very good analysis of some of the decision making that vendors should be utilising before committing to a conference. He highlighted benefits that Broadbean has seen over the past couple of years and also some of the reasons that many vendors may take on less events in 2009.

One of the other comments essentially stated that conferences were of no real value, as any information you needed to find could all be found on the Web or directly from the vendors.

For conference attendees, I find the "I can get the information free" argument to be essentially self defeating. I have spent many years on all sides of the conference spectrum - vendor/sponsor, speaker/chairman, delegate and conference organiser. (and not just in recruitment, but in such diverse areas as financial services and decision support technologies).

So, here is my two cents: First and foremost, there is nothing like meeting people in person, having both direct and group discussions. No amount of web research, reading brochures or even telephone calls can replace the learning experience from conversations that you have at a well attended and run event - with the speakers, other delegates and the exhibitors.

Why should you attend a recruitment conference?

Expanding Job Searches Across the Globe

Mountain View, CA – October 28, 2008 – Today, Simply Hired launches international job search websites for Canada ,(www.SimplyHired.ca), the United Kingdom (www.SimplyHired.co.uk ), Australia (www.SimplyHired.com.au) and India (www.SimplyHired.co.in). The sites will include over 1.5 million job listings aggregated from the leading job boards, content websites, newspapers, organizations and company career pages from these four countries. Simply Hired continues to be a comprehensive job search engine with over seven million jobs worldwide and counting.

“The launch of these websites is an integral part of Simply Hired’s effort to expand our mission in building the largest worldwide job search engine,” states Gautam Godhwani, Co-founder and CEO of Simply Hired. “We want to continue making the job search process a positive experience globally and leverage the successful business model we have built in the U.S.”

By aggregating job listings from around the Web, Simply Hired offers a “one-stop shop” for job seekers. Job seekers simply type in a keyword and location, and Simply Hired returns relevant job postings from hundreds of sources, so users avoid conducting multiple searches on various sites.

These international Simply Hired sites also incorporate a number of advanced features to make finding a job a more enjoyable experience. Job seekers can utilize the browse tool to view jobs from specific occupational categories or filter their results by location, job type, education and experience. Job seekers also have the option to perform an advanced search to return job listings that match specific criteria and have the ability to view only the jobs added since their last visit.

“Simply Hired not only wants to provide consumers with a tool to simplify their job search, but can benefit employers and publishers as well,” says Sachin Shah, Director of Product Management. “As we expand globally, we intend to create solutions that will continue to benefit the whole Internet recruitment industry.”

For recruiters and direct employers, Simply Hired offers the ability to add their jobs into these international sites through a job feed. They can also advertise their employment brand via premium display ads that appear on relevant search result pages. To express interest in including jobs, visit any Simply Hired international site and click the “Add Jobs” link at the bottom of the page. For more information about advertising with display ads on Simply Hired, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

For the publisher community such as job boards, bloggers and content sites, Simply Hired can provide additional, relevant job listings to supplement existing content. By including job listings on their sites, publishers can improve their visitor engagement and increase traffic. Simply Hired currently powers the international job channel for MySpace UK, and supplements LinkedIn’s job board with millions of job listings from Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, France, Germany and Spain. For more information about incorporating Simply Hired international job search content on your site, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The Recruitment Conference, sponsored by Recruitment Consultant Magazine hosts its annual Technology conference this week in London. RCE co-founder, Alan Whitford, is one of the speakers in a stellar line up of industry experts.

Here is the programme. If you have not yet registered, take advantage of this opportunity and come on down now. Keith and I will write some blogs about the event for posting here on the RCE site.