Writing a recruitment email newsletter
Best practice when recruiting for your school or college involves focusing on your Talent Pool – i.e. your database of active and passive, yet interested candidates – all year, regardless of whether you’re recruiting or not. Those candidates should be nurtured for the long-term, years in some cases.
Whether you currently have a Talent Pool or not (and if you don’t, it’s about time you did!), sharing regular updates about success in your school with potential team members can contribute greatly to your Employer Value Proposition (aka, the reasons your school is so great).
One way to effectively share updates is through a recruitment newsletter. You can borrow some of the school news content from your parent- and student-facing school newsletter, but the introduction must be unique and really drive home the very different, yet most important message of the recruitment newsletter. What is that message? That you’re absolutely the best school to work for ever, that everyone at your school thinks so, that all other teachers should want to work for you, and that you offer the best CPD, lifestyle, parking, behaviour – even the best tea bags – on the planet!
Now we’ve cleared that one up, here are three more essentials for creating an engaging recruitment newsletter candidates will enjoy reading:
Use attention-grabbing subject lines
Tell us: would you be inspired to open an email titled ‘November recruitment newsletter’? No, you wouldn’t! You need your subject line to grab the reader’s attention, or it’ll end up in the junk folder and all that amazing content in the newsletter will go unread – all that time, wasted.
Tease what’s in the newsletter so that it drives candidates to open it and find out. Use questions to pull them in, and personalisation to make them feel valued. Whatever tactic is up your sleeve, just don’t forget to keep the subject line short and sweet.
Strike that golden balance
As we mentioned, your recruitment newsletter can use much of the content of your standard newsletter, tweaked if needed to suit the different audience. Around 80% should inform candidates on school news and updates – stick to the good stuff, like awards, events you’re hosting, or initiatives that make your school stand out.
The final 20% can directly reach out to candidates to get them to apply. This could form most of the introduction, but make sure it’s mentioned near the end of the newsletter, too.
Get branding
Schools are businesses, so branding is important. The design of the newsletter, coupled with the written content, will help your school to make a lasting impression on candidates. So, be sure to use your school’s logo, colour themes and fonts (if you have them), as well as photos that convey a positive message to readers – and are nice to look at!
Speaking of design, text needs to broken up with graphics and images, or you might end up putting readers off. Keep it succinct, too; the trick is to say what you want to say, using as few words as possible. It’s a good idea to integrate hyperlinks within the email too, whether it’s to your social pages, job listings or school website.
If you need to get exposure to a wider range of candidates before you can reach out to them with a quality recruitment newsletter, why not speak to us about School Recruiter? Powered by social, mobile, analytic and cloud technologies, it will set your school up with a suite of tools to help you attract, screen, recruit and hire top talent.