The professional recruiters guide to writing emails

At WRS Tech we believe relationships and communication are the keys to successful and mutual beneficial recruitment practices. Face to face meetings and the telephone are still the best ways to foster good relationships and lines of communications and we encourage every member of our team to reach out to clients and candidates in this way. However in the modern international recruitment environment emails are a vital necessity in creating and maintaining business relationships.

There’s no right or wrong way to write a business email. Each person has their own voice and style. There is, however, a professional recruitment way. Here’s how to master it:  

Start with a compelling subject line

• First impressions absolutely count. As the first thing your recipients will see, your subject line needs to get your email off on the right foot. Make it snappy (long subject lines tend to get truncated when viewed on mobile devices), and let the reader know exactly what’s coming later in the body of your email.    

Keep the body short and to the point

• In most cases, an email doesn’t need to be more than a couple of hundred words, max. People just don’t have the time to go through paragraph after paragraph. Dump the friendly ‘warm up’ intro too – instead, use the first line or two to briefly outline what the rest of your email is about.

Avoid walls of text

• People generally skim emails. As a professional courtesy, help your recipients by including headers, bullet points and links wherever you can. It’ll also make your email (and you) look more organised.

Ditch the jargon

• Just like when you speak, writing an email means you sometimes have to put a little extra thought into the words you’re using. Too many technical terms and phrases will instantly turn your readers off, and can diminish your credibility. Write like a human – you want to come across as approachable and personable, not a robot.

Use an appropriate tone and style

• That means NO SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS or channeling your inner e. e. cummings by doing away with capital letters altogether. Text speak and wacky fonts are also big no-nos – you want to exude a calm, got-it-all-together vibe at all times, and those are surefire ways to kill it.    

Don’t type on your phone

• When writing an email, the professional thing to do is to think about it and draft it properly. Easily done on a computer, but unless you have the fingers of an aye-aye or the patience of a monk, typing on your smartphone isn’t always going to cut it. 

Edit and proofread

• Carelessness is never a good look, especially not in an email where any mistakes will stay for posterity. Before hitting ‘Send’, make sure you go over what you’ve written at least a few times – if you come across a typo or if anything reads even a little bit off, fix it immediately. 

Reply only to the sender

• ‘Reply All’ is not your friend. Unless you’re sure that everyone else will gain something from your response to an email, reply back only to the original sender. A true professional always respects other people’s personal spaces, digital or otherwise.