Source Candidates with Personal Emails for a Stronger Talent Pipeline

Sourcing and recruiting great talent to hire is challenging in today's competitive market. It is time-consuming to find qualified candidates, build lists and efficiently reach out.

Apollo has now made sourcing candidates quick and effortless using the same powerful tools for prospecting and engagement that our sellers use in their daily workflows.

We’ve launched Personal Emails in our database so hiring managers, recruiters, sourcers, founders, and more can find and reach qualified candidates.

You can now streamline your recruiting processes for both passive and outbound talent acquisition, all within Apollo. Use Apollo to uncover qualified candidates’ personal emails and use our powerful email tools to reach those potential hires where they are more likely to respond.

Data shows that 90% of candidates prefer to be contacted via email over LinkedIn, according to Gem’s Recruiting Trends Report.

Grow your talent pool with personal emails

With our tremendous growth of 60% more paying users, we’ve noticed that many use Apollo to solve challenges beyond just selling and prospecting. Our large user base of founders has been using Apollo for recruiting, and we have had an increasing number of recruiters signing up for our platform too!

To keep serving your needs, Apollo is now providing personal emails in our database to help you quickly source qualified candidates and improve your talent pipeline. With easy access to personal emails, you can reach out to people for recruiting or consulting asks that might not be relevant to the company they work at.

With the addition of Personal Emails, the Apollo database is even more comprehensive and rich. You can find personal emails in our In-App Search or Chrome Extension and access all the data intelligence and insights that come with each contact to personalize your outreach.

The best part about this release is that we are offering this as part of our existing packages. Access a contact’s business and personal email with only a single email credit. How awesome is that? Sign up for free today and get 50 free email credits.

Improve your candidate interest rates with hyper-targeted outreach

Once you’ve done candidate generation and built your prospect list in Apollo, don’t stop there! We have some well-tested outreach tools to help you effectively get in touch with prospects and move them through the talent pipeline.

Use our Sequences to automatically send your first email to prospects and set up follow-up emails if they don’t respond. With Sequences, you’ll be able to connect with prospects at scale while being hyper-targeted and personalized in your emails.

Automating your outreach does not mean you’ll apply a spray-and-pray method; rather, you're able to do hyper-targeted personalized outreach at scale.

If you choose to manually email, using Sequences will still help you save time and stay on top of your inbox. Once you add a contact to the Sequence, Apollo will create an email task for you to review before hitting send.

Another time-saving feature is to create email templates in Apollo and use our Chrome Extension that works on Gmail to get emails out quickly.

How to start sourcing qualified candidates in Apollo

Let’s dive into a step-by-step guide on how you can be more effective in your top-of-funnel recruiting efforts in Apollo:

Step 1. Update your primary email address

First, your Apollo admin user must update the Primary Email Address to ‘Personal email’ or ‘Any'. If this isn’t set, then you will not be able to access any personal emails.

To change your primary email:

1. Launch Apollo and click Settings > Prospecting Config.
2. Find the Primary Email Address section. Here, you have 3 options: Business, Personal, or Any

Click the email type that you want to set as primary. Then, click Save. 

Updating this setting is also important if you want to leverage the rest of the Apollo platform for your recruiting efforts.

Here are two more reasons why updating to the right setting will be necessary:

• When you add a contact to a Sequence for email outreach, by default we will send it to their primary email.
• When mapping contacts from Apollo to your CRM, we can only sync over a primary email.

To dive into this further, check out our Apollo Knowledge Base article here.

Step 2. Access a contact’s verified personal email

Go about your prospecting on Apollo per usual, whether on our In-app Search or Chrome Extension (or both!). Again, no matter how many emails are displayed, we will only charge one email credit per contact.

Once the personal email is shown, save it to a candidate list, or add the contact to a Sequence with a simple click.

Step 3. Build a hyper-targeted and personalized outreach campaign

You’ve built your prospective candidate list and are ready to get in touch! Use Sequences to create customizable, multi-step touchpoints with automatic or manual emails, phone calls, LinkedIn messaging, and other outbound efforts.

Email will likely be your primary touch point (especially since 90% of candidates prefer to be contacted via email), so let’s see how you can set up Sequences to help you be faster and more effective in your outreach.

Below is an example of how we created a Sequence to hire a Customer Success Manager. This Sequence delivered some pretty stellar engagement metrics; over 75% open rate and 25% click rate.

Our recommended tips and tricks

1. Structure the Sequence with a three-step automated email campaign. Add two follow-up emails a few days after each other to prompt a response, even if it’s a no.
2. A/B test your first email. Since it’s your very first touch point with the prospect, you want to make sure it’s eye-catching! In our example, we are testing four different email subject lines, where the main email body is the same text. The second subject line, “Career growth opportunity at fast-growing US-based SaaS startup,” was the winner on engagement metrics.
3. Use snippets to personalize the email, such as adding {{first name}} to both the subject line and the email body. There are plenty of basic and advanced snippets you can use on Apollo.
4. Save your emails as templates and tweak them for other roles you’d want to create automated and hyper-targeted outreach Sequences for.

This was a quick crash course on how to quickly get set up with a Sequence to effectively reach out to prospective candidates using personal emails. We offer many more tools that can help streamline your recruiting efforts. Stay tuned as we’ll share more best practices in our blog!

Ready to expand your talent prospect volume? Sign up for a free account and start sourcing more candidates with personal emails and our other prospecting and engagement features today!