There’s a reason why email marketing is a priority for most recruitment teams - it’s a strategy that really works. In fact, studies have shown that email is 40 times more effective for marketing than Facebook and Twitter combined. Let that sink in!
Colleges tend to be a bit more hesitant to use email for recruitment than other sectors. Sending emails to parents? Sure, but emailing candidates is another story. How do you find the right candidates to contact about your vacancies, for example? And how do you make sure your recruitment email strategy is GDPR-compliant?
Let’s take a look at some different types of recruitment email campaigns that work well for recruiting educators, plus some recruitment email template examples you can use to inspire your campaigns.
Cold passive candidate emails
There’s no denying that most of the best educators you want to interview for your vacancies won’t be actively looking for a job right now. Even if they’re unhappy in their current post and keen to move on, how can anyone find the time between teaching and marking to pursue a job hunt?
A ‘cold’ passive candidate email is when you reach out to these candidates. They might know of your college already and even visited your website before, but they’ve never applied for your jobs or joined your Talent Pool. How do you reach these kinds of candidates, if they’re not looking for work and don’t know who you are?
FEjobs has a database of 400,000+ FE educators that your college can tap into. Through a passive candidate emailing service, you can promote your vacancy to a specific segment of that database that’s highly relevant to the role. This strategy is particularly effective when you’re recruiting for hard-to-fill positions such as STEM subjects or leadership, as it’s an opportunity to reach candidates you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
Candidates in the FEjobs database are engaged and have consented to email marketing, meaning you can reach entirely new candidates without worrying about GDPR.
Just imagine you’re one of those educators; exhausted and overworked from a busy teaching schedule and a long commute, and an email drops into your inbox advertising a vacancy at a prestigious college that’s only 5km from your home. This is the sort of recruitment email that can literally change someone’s life.
Warm active candidate emails
Warm active candidates are those who are proactively looking for new employment and they’ve given you some indication that they’re interested in working at your college. For example, maybe they’ve previously applied to one of your roles or they’ve joined your Talent Pool, but they just haven’t seen the right opportunity come up yet.
If you’ve built a Talent Pool for your college, this means you’ll have a mini database in your recruitment software containing educators who share similar credentials, skills and location. Targeting email campaigns to candidates in your Talent Pool is a great way to mass-email candidates while being super personalised with your communication.
Here’s an example template:
Dear [name],
I have some good news! We’re about to start recruiting for a new [role] at [college].
As a [job title] based in [location], I wanted to reach out and invite you to apply as you could be a great fit for this opportunity.
Here’s a link to the job advert [link]. We are yet to advertise the role on job boards, as we wanted to reach out to our top candidates first.
Please get in touch if you have any questions.
Kind Regards,
[name]
Are you an FEjobs Premium licence holder? Then you’re in luck! You’ll also have access to a Regional Talent Pool, where candidates have registered their interest in working in your area. You can reach out to candidates within this pool and invite them to apply to relevant vacancies!
Find out more about FEjobs Premium here.
Candidate re-engagement emails
If you don’t have a particular role you’re recruiting for, but you just want to engage with candidates in your database who have gone quiet, an automated re-engagement email will do the trick.
Sending a simple email to make sure you have all the right information on that candidate can mean the difference between making a hire and not. For example, what if the candidate was a teaching assistant when they joined your Talent Pool, but now they’re a qualified Drama educator? Continuing to send them TA vacancies is not going to result in applications.
Sending a monthly re-engagement email to candidates in your Talent Pool will ensure you have their most up-to-date details and therefore promoting the right jobs to them. Here’s a basic example:
Dear [name],
Are you still looking for [job title] roles?
We want to make sure we’re only sending you job opportunities that match your ambitions, so please let us know if your situation has changed.
Kind Regards,
[name]
Recruitment Newsletters
It’s likely your college sends regular newsletters out to parents, but what about candidates? If you were interested in working at a college, you’d want to know about events they’ve been running, awards they’ve won and personal success stories of pupils and staff, right? This is why newsletters are great for employer branding too.
Of course, you can’t send educators the same email you’re sending out to parents. An employer branding newsletter involves speaking to an entirely different audience, but most of the content will be easily transferable. A lot of the time, it’s just a matter of editing the preview text for each piece of content in your email so it speaks directly to candidates.
In addition to your regular newsletter content, this is an opportunity to share your current vacancies as well as any employer branding content you have (e.g., employee testimonials, ‘day in the life’ blogs, etc).
And if this all sounds like too much work, don’t worry – you can dip into FEjobs's 60,000+ newsletter subscribers instead. FEjobs sends a newsletter with featured jobs and a featured recruiter section to a highly engaged audience of 60,000+ FE educators twice a month.
Get in touch if you’d like to include your job in the next newsletter.
Rejected candidate emails
When you’re against the clock trying to fill a teaching vacancy before a new term begins, it’s only natural finding that one dream candidate becomes the only thing that matters. So much so that any unsuccessful candidates get totally ignored – including top talent.
What’s your process for following up with candidates who were in your hiring pipeline but didn’t get hired? Because rejected candidates are recruitment gold! They’ve already made it through your initial screening and perhaps even made it to your interview round. Therefore, you know they’re great candidates, even if they weren’t right for that particular role for one reason or another.
Sending a targeted, personalised email campaign to these previously rejected candidates is an excellent way to fill a role in record time. The key is to be highly personalised with your outreach, as you want to make it look like you’re reaching out to them directly. And you should be able to do this impactfully using personalisation tokens in your recruitment marketing software.
Set up a template similar to the following and watch the responses flood in!
Hi [first name],
A while ago, you applied to our [role] vacancy at [college].
We wanted to let you know that a similar role has just come up at the college, and we think you’d be a good fit for it.
Here’s a link to the job advert [link]. Would you consider submitting an application?
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Kind Regards,
[Name]
If you’d like to speak to someone about how to outsource your recruitment marketing, just request a call with FEjobs and a member of the team will be in touch.
About the author
Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson is a writer and digital marketer specialising in recruitment, marketing, HR technology, and business growth. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.