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?

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Monster®, the leading global online career and recruitment resource and flagship brand of Monster Worldwide, Inc. (NYSE: MWW), today unveiled its new global seeker experience. Launched in 24 countries, the new site offers job seekers an innovative, intuitive, and personal experience designed to deliver a fulfilling career management resource.

“Monster has made a significant investment in product and technology in an effort to design and develop new tools and applications that help job seekers manage their career,” said Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, president and CEO of Monster Worldwide. “The result is an entirely new site experience which allows job seekers a more engaging and dynamic way to find the career that best matches their talent, background, aspirations and professional goals. We set out 18 months ago to deliver the best seeker experience possible. Given what is going on today with the global economic crisis and its effect on employment, we are even more gratified to be able to provide these valuable tools to seekers.”

The new site will allow seekers to more efficiently register with Monster, upload and maintain their resumes, conduct job searches, and apply to jobs. In fact, it is now over 70 percent easier to upload a resume to Monster, and registered seekers can apply for a job in as few as two clicks. This improved functionality will roll out in 24 countries immediately. In addition, unique new career management applications have been designed to not only attract, but engage and appeal to both the active and passive seeker. Available initially in the U.S and rolling out to other countries in the coming months, these include:

* Monster Career Mapping – patent-pending career exploration tool that leads people to explore their careers via many possible and interconnecting paths. This tool will provide an unrivaled ability for seekers to explore career paths taken by people similar to them in skills and experience, enabling them to set reality-based immediate and future career goals, and understand the steps to get there. Monster leveraged the depth of its resume database to analyze work histories to provide empirical evidence about the most commonly chosen career paths people take.

* Monster Career Snapshots – a tool that allows users to access thousands of occupational profiles describing various roles, the skills required, the compensation and work/life balance associated with them. This tool will also provide the ability for users to share their similar careers and experience to provide a dynamic and deeper understanding for seekers.

* Monster Career Benchmarking – assessment tool that helps candidates measure themselves against other individuals or jobs in their industry so they can compete more effectively for the positions they desire.

“The new Monster is a dynamic, interactive, intuitive destination experience – not a static, one-way job board,” said Darko Dejanovic, executive vice president, global chief information officer and head of product, Monster. “Ultimately, these changes create a platform that will enable us to continue to introduce new and exciting functionality in the future. Similarly – and equally important – employers will benefit from increased candidate engagement and activity, and improved reach and presentation of their jobs to the right seekers.”

In addition to Monster’s new seeker capabilities yielding more qualified candidates, Monster’s new Audience Sponsorship product leverages the new seeker experience by providing employers with increased exposure through expanded media solutions. The product allows employers to target desired seekers by advertising where relevant seekers are searching and navigating the site. Also benefitting employers, Monster has begun rolling out a new employer site experience designed to improve the overall recruitment process. New enhanced resume search, job and candidate management, job posting wizard and online resource center tools are designed to help employers increase productivity and maximize their recruitment return on investment.

“Today's ‘new’ Monster not only provides the resources to help people find a job now, it also helps people begin to identify and plot out career aspirations over time,” said Iannuzzi. “We’re delivering on our promise to make Monster a personal, relevant and exciting place to search for the perfect job. Simply put, there has never been a better time to visit Monster.com.”

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.