What an Ice Cream Truck Can Teach Recruiters About Cold Email
How I burned $800, landed in spam, and the strategy that turned it all around
By Harrison Franke, Co-Founder of Recruitcha GTM
My cursor hovered over the ‘Send’ button.
I was about to pitch technical recruiting to 10000 CTOs and engineering leaders, and felt super nervous.
It was the first time I’d launched a cold email campaign, and thoughts were swirling.
Is this spam? Will this even work?
I let out a deep breath, and launched the campaign.
The first day, nothing.
The second, some no’s and out-of-office replies, but then, a few days later, I got a bite!
It was the head of engineering at a popular sleep tech startup who’d just raised their Series D and was hiring engineers like crazy.
Andrew and I got on the call, and the hiring manager agreed to work with us.
I was stoked!
This was our first ‘logo client’, and it felt like we were on to something.
Since 10000 contacts yielded results, all I needed was a bigger list, right?
Unfortunately, my inbox’s rise to fame was short-lived, and it’d take multiple failures to learn how to make this channel work consistently.
After running a few campaigns, I soon found myself back at square one with a very sad-looking pipeline and was $800 out of pocket.
I ran a deliverability test, and all of my emails were landing in spam across Google and Microsoft.
Was the initial success just beginner’s luck? Was it the list? Does cold email actually work long-term? How come other Recruiters seem to get it right?
Fast-forward a year and over 100k emails sent, and I have a key insight to share that changed how I approach business development for agency recruitment.
The way most recruiters start, as I did, is with a big list of hiring managers. The bigger the better, I thought.
This approach works best for large markets, but has one fundamental problem which made results inconsistent and caused a cascade of issues:
- With big lists, I was contacting a large part of my market and had no idea who was hiring
- This meant my emails were more likely to get ignored or marked as spam
- The more my emails got marked as spam, the faster my sender accounts burned
- The faster my sending accounts burned, the more I needed to spend to buy new accounts
On the surface, the problem looked like the list size, but the real issue was that I didn’t know if someone was hiring when I reached out, so my emails were irrelevant to 95% of my market.
If I could help agency recruiters understand one thing about cold email, outbound, and go-to-market strategy, it’s this:
Start with the signal, not the list.
A hiring signal is something that lets you know a potential client could use your recruitment services.
It could be a job post, a funding round, a change in management, or a hiring manager posting on LinkedIn. There are many, and the more you identify, the more contextually relevant your outreach will be, which makes you more likely to book a meeting.
For example, imagine a figurative CTO, ‘John’, just raised a series A round is hiring AI/ML Engineers in San Francisco.
John creates a role in his ATS, Ashby, and the JD outlines 5+ years of experience building data pipelines. You also know John’s main competitor is a company called ‘Apex’.
Reaching out the next day with, ‘Hi John, how’s the search for your AI/ML Engineer going? Putting an ex-Apex candidate on your radar who just entered the job market. In SF with 5+ years scaling data pipelines. Can I share their resume?’
Versus: ‘Hi John, saw you [insert generic personalization]. I’m a [standard recruiter pitch]. Can I share some profiles?'
The first leads with value, the second leads with noise.
The first gets interest, the second gets spam.
Another way to think of signals is from the perspective of an ice cream truck driver with John as the craving customer.
Imagine John really feels like ice cream today.
Just as he’s about to go out and buy some, he hears the jingle of an ice cream truck driving past his house and thinks, perfect timing.
In this example, the driver is meandering around John’s neighborhood (adressable market), making a lot of noise (generic email pitch), and hoping John will buy (spray and pray approach). He might, but he also might have just eaten lunch and be kind of annoyed the driver is outside his door.
In the recruiting world, this means time and money spent on reaching hiring managers when they’re unlikely to book a call.
Now, instead, imagine the driver is parked in the middle of John’s neighborhood. He has an app that tells him when John and others like him Google ‘ice cream near me’.
All he needs to do is show up with his ice cream (value), and he’s confident John will buy, especially if he gets a taste (pitching a minimum placeable candidate).
It’s the same for recruiters running cold email as a business development channel, except instead of using a who-wants-an-ice-cream app, we monitor job posts, funding, leadership changes, etc that tell us:
- Which company needs us most right now
- Who to reach out to at that company
- What are they hiring for from the JD
- The kind of minimum placeable candidates we could pitch to them
…and this means we can sell to John every day with higher confidence that he’ll convert to a new client.
Starting with hiring signals means prospecting lists are built instead of generically bought, which is the cornestone of writing copy that generates positive replies, books meetings, and builds client pipelines.