Candidate Outreach

What is Candidate Outreach?

Candidate Outreach is a quick and easy way to start and manage email messaging campaigns from within your projects in SeekOut. Every project you create has an Outreach tab, where you can initiate campaigns for individuals, groups, or the entirety of your project.

Note Before you visit the Outreach tab, you'll need to link your email to SeekOut. See the article How to connect your email account to SeekOut for steps on how to do this. Linking your email is required to use the Outreach feature.

Video Overview

Check out a video overview of Candidate Outreach with SeekOut, or keep scrolling to read more.

How to access Candidate Outreach

Select Projects from the menu on the left to see all of your projects containing talent you've found while searching. Click on the name of a project to open it up, then click the Outreach tab at the top of the page.

The first time you visit the Outreach tab in a project, you'll need to build your first campaign message before continuing.

Building your Campaign Message

Click Build new campaign to open the message editor in your browser. The email editor has a toolbar that you can use to add formatting to your email message. Highlight a piece of text and click the buttons to choose your formatting options.

Write or paste your message into the box and use the edit toolbar to format your text. Use the {{var}} button to add variables that will be automatically filled in when you send your message, such as the candidate's name, job title, or even the day of the week.

Click Next step to add another step in your campaign. When creating follow-up messages, you can specify how long to wait before the next message is sent, as well as if you want to send your next email in the same thread (as a reply to your first email) or in a new thread (a new email).

When you're done creating your campaign, click Save and close at the top of the campaign pop-up. You can edit your campaign messages on the Outreach tab by clicking Edit campaign at the top right of the candidate list.

Additional controls when customizing your message campaign

You can also access templates, signatures, and attachments from the campaign pop-up.

Signature

Click Signature at the bottom of the campaign pop-up to manage your signature template. Select Edit Signature to create and edit your signature. Use the edit toolbar to format your signature, then click Save signature to save your changes. Once you have a signature saved, click Signature and then Add Signature to add your signature to your message.

Attachments

Click Add file at the bottom of the campaign pop-up to add file attachments to your message. Once you add an attachment, the file name will appear at the bottom of the message body in the campaign pop-up. Click the trash can 🗑️ to remove an attachment from the message.

Note: Some email hosts will block emails with attachments before the recipient has a chance to view the email in their inbox. If you're using attachments and a lot of your messages are not being opened, try removing attachments from future campaigns to see if that improves the success rate of your campaign.

Candidate List

Once the first step in your campaign has been created, the candidates in your project will be listed on the Outreach tab along with information about their campaign status.

Click on a column header such as Campaign status and Previous Step to filter the candidates in your Outreach campaign. You can use these filters to show only candidates who have replied, or who have had bounced messages, or candidates who are on the same step of the campaign.

Creating a Campaign

You can create and run a campaign for an individual, a group of people, or the entirety of the candidates in your project.

Getting candidate email addresses

Candidates must have an email address associated with their profile before you can begin outreach. Candidates without an email address will have a status of "Missing email" on the candidate list. Click Get email to use a contact credit and retrieve the candidate's email address.

Note: See the article Contact Information Credits for more information on how contact credits are counted.

You can also check the box next to multiple candidate names and click the arrow next to Preview at the top right of the candidate list, then select Get email for x and retrieve email addresses for many candidates at one time.

Preview your message

Messages must be previewed before you begin your campaign. Click the Preview button next to a person on your candidate list to open the preview pop-up. You'll see a preview of the message that you're about to send to your candidate. Any variables that you inserted when building your campaign message will be replaced with the candidate's information, such as their name or job title.

Click Customize to edit your message before sending. Use the edit toolbar to make formatting changes, and click Save changes to save your updated message.

Note: Once you've edited a specific candidate's message, you'll no longer be able to make changes to the campaign template via the Edit campaign button above the candidate list.

Preview messages for multiple candidates by checking the box next to each candidate name, then clicking Preview x on the top right of the candidate list. Review each candidate's campaign in the preview pop-up, making any necessary changes as you see them. Use the arrows next to the candidate name at the top left of the pop-up to move to the next candidate until all messages have been previewed.

When you're done previewing all of the messages you're prepared to send, you can begin your campaign.

Starting your campaign

Click Start campaign at the top right of the preview pop-up to begin the message campaign for that candidate. Use the arrows next to the candidate name in the preview pop-up to select the next candidate, and click Start campaign to begin their campaign as well. Repeat these steps for each candidate in your campaign.

If you've already previewed all of your candidate messages and you want to begin the campaign for all candidates, go to the candidate list in the Outreach tab and click the check box at the top left of the list to select all candidates. Click the down arrow next to Preview at the top right of the list and select Start campaign for x. When successful, you'll see a confirmation message telling you how many campaigns have started.

List of Campaign Statuses

After you've built a campaign message, you can see each candidate's status next to their name on the candidate list. These are the possible statuses a candidate can have:

• Waiting for Preview

  • The candidate has a valid email and you can preview your outreach message to them by clicking the Preview button.

• Missing Email

  • The candidate is missing a valid email address. Either click Get Email to use a contact credit and retrieve the candidate's email address, or click the arrow on the far right of the candidate's entry and select Add Email to manually add an email address.

• Running

  • The outreach campaign has started for this candidate.

• Paused

  • The outreach campaign for this candidate has been paused. Click Resume Campaign to resume the campaign from where you left off.

• Opened

  • The candidate has opened at least one of your outreach messages.

• Replied

  • The candidate has replied to one or more of your outreach messages.

• Clicked

  • The candidate clicked on a link you included in your campaign message.

• Campaign Ended

  • All of the campaign messages have been sent to the candidate and the campaign has ended.

• Error

  • An error has occurred preventing the campaign from running for this candidate. Please reach out to your CSM or support@seekout.com if you see an Error status on one of your outreach campaigns.

• Bounced

  • A message sent to your candidate has bounced and couldn't be delivered.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens if a message I send to a candidate bounces?

If you have a message that bounces, then the candidate's status will change to Bounced on your Outreach tab and the campaign will pause for that candidate. To restart the campaign, find the candidate in your Outreach tab and click the email address under their name. Select another email address (or add an address manually), then click the down arrow on the ride side of their row and select Revert Candidate. Finally, click the arrow once more and select Start Campaign.