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?

Presentations at The Recruitment Conference IT and Technology Revealed

On 11 February 2009 Recruitment Consultant’s IT and technology conference will see an informative and lively programme of events.

Held at the British Library and sponsored by the Charterhouse Group the event will provide delegates with the most up-to-date advancements within the industry’s fast-moving world.

The day starts at 8.30am with registration, coffee and networking in the impressive atrium of the library’s conference centre.

Guests will then make their way into the comfortable lecture hall for introductions before founder of Web Based Recruitment Mike Taylor gives a presentation on online marketing.

Response handling issues and new technology are next up, the speaker is yet to be confirmed.

A chance for coffee and networking is set to be followed by a fascinating presentation on search engine optimisation before applicant tracking and social networking is dealt with by Alan Whitford, managing partner of Abtech PartnershipRecruitment Community Europe and co-founder of . This will be followed by a buffet lunch.

The cost of a ticket is £265+vat and REC and ATSCo members will be offered discounts due to both associations` support for the event.

To book your place at this prestigious event contact This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or call 0845 094 8022. The full conference programme can now be viewed at www.rec-con.co.uk/conference

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.