Picture a top-notch operations director. She’s good at her job, well paid, and not looking.
This week she’s opened 4 recruiter messages. Every one of them starts with “Hi (First Name).” Every one calls her background “impressive.” Every one mentions an “exciting opportunity” and asks if she’s open to a “quick chat.”
She deletes all 4.
She isn’t being rude. She’s just tired of being treated like a name on a list.
And if you’re the hiring authority who needed her? You’ll never know she was the perfect fit.
I’m Michael Petras, owner of Lodestar Recruiting here in South Bend, Indiana. I’ve read more resumes and recruiting messages than I care to count.
Here’s what I’ve learned: email isn’t the problem. Bad email is.
Everybody Can Spot a Template
Candidates can smell a form letter a mile away.
In daily.dev’s 2025 State of Developer Trust survey, 64% of developers said recruiter messages feel copy-pasted. Worse, 55% suspect that “personalized” messages are really AI-generated. So even recruiters writing honest, genuine notes start from behind.
Then comes the silence. In Greenhouse’s 2025 Workforce & Hiring Report, a survey of job seekers in the U.S., U.K., and Ireland, 63% of candidates said employers left them in the dark after interviews. And half admit they’ve ghosted an employer right back.
Don’t you just hate that?!
There’s an old saying: treating people with indifference is worse than rejecting them.
So…Should You Just Pick Up the Phone?
Nope.
Some folks will tell you the cure is to cold call everybody. Trust me. It isn’t.
Most people don’t want a surprise call from a stranger. I don’t. You probably don’t either. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey of more than 10,000 U.S. adults found that 8 in 10 Americans don’t generally answer their cellphone when an unknown number calls.
Job seekers feel the same way. Employ’s 2025 Job Seeker Nation Report, based on a survey of more than 1,500 U.S. adults, found that candidates overwhelmingly prefer email over phone calls or in-person communication for follow-up. (Frontline workers in retail or healthcare may lean toward phone or text.)
So the answer isn’t to ditch email. The answer is to write a better one.
What a Good First Email Looks Like
In my experience, a short, well-written, warm email is still the best way to open the door with a busy professional.
The secret? It’s about them…not you.
A mass message says, “Here’s my job. Are you interested?”
A good message says, “I saw you led the plant expansion at your company. Here’s a role that might give you something you’ve been missing…more say in strategy, a shorter commute, a real shot at the top job. Worth a conversation?”
See the difference?
One is a sales pitch. The other is an invitation.
Short matters, too. LinkedIn’s own research found that InMails of 400 characters or fewer get responses at a rate 22% higher than the global average. That’s 3 or 4 sentences. You don’t need a novel.
Pearl of Wisdom: The only purpose of a first email is to earn a conversation. That’s it. Save everything else for when they say yes.
This Isn’t an In-House Recruiter Problem. It’s a Math Problem.
I’m not here to pick on internal recruiters. Talent Acquisition folks are some of the hardest-working people in any company. But look at what they’re up against.
Gem’s 2025 Recruiting Benchmarks Report, built on data from more than 140 million applications, found the average recruiter now manages 14 open requisitions. That’s 56% more than three years earlier, with 2.7 times as many applications (2,500+). Meanwhile, the average recruiting team shrank from 31 people in 2022 to 24 in 2024.
14 open jobs, a mountain of applicants, and a button that says “send to 50 candidates.” What would you do?
Of course mass messaging becomes the default. It isn’t laziness. It’s survival. But survival mode rarely produces a note that makes a happily employed A-Player stop scrolling.
Where a Third-Party Recruiter Earns Their Keep
This is where a good outside recruiter shines.
I write a personal message to one person, not a blast to 500. When the door opens, I walk through it and have a real conversation, on their schedule.
That’s when the real work happens.
I find out the real reason someone would leave their current job…which is almost never the reason they’d put in writing. I hear the hesitation in their voice when we talk about relocating. I tell them why your company might matter to them…especially after they share with me their burning issues.
The Hidden Payoff: Trust Turns Into Referrals
When you treat someone like a person instead of a lead, good things happen…even when they say no.
A strong candidate who isn’t looking often agrees to share with me 1 or 2 referrals.
That doesn’t happen because I sent the right 5-step email sequence. It happens because we had a real conversation and they trust me. Nobody passes a friend’s name to a bot.
Those referrals are gold. In a study of 9 large firms published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Burks, Cowgill, Hoffman, and Housman found referred workers were substantially less likely to quit and produced higher profits per worker. Their working-paper version puts it at 10-30% lower quit rates.
Gem’s data agrees: a sourced candidate is 5 times more likely to be hired than an inbound applicant.
Bottom line…your best candidates usually aren’t applying. They’re reached. Often through someone they trust.
What You Can Do Starting Monday
Whether you’re a CEO or a first-time hiring manager, you don’t need a new tool. You need a few good habits:
- Read your own outreach. Ask to see the actual messages going out for your roles. Would you answer one? If it could be sent to anyone, it’ll be ignored by everyone.
- Lead with what they want. Talk about the candidate’s goals before you talk about your requirements.
- Keep it short. 3 or 4 honest sentences beat 3 paragraphs of buzzwords.
- Don’t ambush anyone. Let the email open the door, then invite a conversation at a time that works for them.
- Close every loop. Follow up with every finalist, including the ones you don’t hire. In a world full of ghosts, simple courtesy makes you memorable.
- Ask for referrals. Keep the focus on your candidate, but if they aren’t interested in exploring your opportunity, always ask for referrals.
- Know when to bring in a 3rd party recruiter. If your team is carrying 14 reqs, adding a partner built on relationships isn’t a failure. It’s smart business.
High-Touch Isn’t Old-Fashioned. It’s Your Advantage.
AI and automation are great at scheduling, sorting, and routine work. But the more outreach gets automated, the rarer a genuine human message becomes. And rare things are valuable.
That’s the whole idea behind Lodestar Recruiting: High-Touch Recruiting. Proven Results. We write to people like people. We listen. We build trust, including with folks who aren’t looking, and that trust leads us to candidates your job posting will never reach.
If you have a role that matters and your messages keep disappearing into the void, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a note through lodestarrecruiting.com. A real person will write you back.
I promise.
Michael Petras is the owner of Lodestar Recruiting LLC, a third-party recruiting firm based in South Bend, Indiana.
