Successful outreach is key to maximizing your hiring success. Here are the guidelines and features you need to master your candidate communication using Visage.
1. Crafting Effective Email Content
The Visage app provides you with powerful tools to ensure your outreach is opened, read, and responded to.
Best Practices for Customization
To dramatically increase your response rates, follow these simple steps:
Avoid making your email complicated or overwhelming. Remove unnecessary text styling, content that doesn't add value, and any internal tracking codes.
Ensure your emails are opened with a focused and creative subject line that includes your company name.
Quickly introduce yourself and lead with an enticing reason the candidate should be interested in the role (e.g., substantial perks, great benefits, professional development).
Include relevant information about the candidate's professional experience (like their current role or company) to show credibility and increase engagement.
Add compelling details about your company culture, values, or recent achievements.
Use a persuasive request that clearly defines the next step (e.g., "I’d love to share more details with you. Are you available this week for a quick and casual chat?").
Using Variables
Try inserting Variables into your templates by clicking the "+" sign next to the specific field. This customizes the email quickly and makes it much more effective.
💡Always send a preview to yourself before saving the template to ensure all variables are displaying correctly!
2. Advanced Communication Settings
Selecting the Sender
You have flexibility in choosing who the outreach appears to come from:
Select a teammate if you need them to handle candidate replies while you are busy or OOO.
Choose a user whose title might make candidates more likely to open and reply (e.g., your Hiring Manager or Team Leader).
If your account admin has configured a custom alias (like talent@company.com), all emails will be sent from and replies will be received by that alias, using the selected Sender's name and signature.
Important Note: The name, last name, and email signature displayed in the candidate emails will always be that of the user selected as the Sender.
Outreach Frequency and Cadence
The default email cadence is 3 emails sent over 5 days, which is proven to increase reply rates. You can easily change these settings, but Visage recommends keeping the sequence relatively short.
Statistically, we see the highest response rates come from emails #2 and #3, so we highly recommend keeping follow-ups active.
If a candidate replies, all outgoing emails immediately stop.
3. Email Performance and Delivery
How Visage Finds and Verifies Emails
Visage employs robust technology to ensure high delivery rates:
For every profile, we run a set of top-performing email finder APIs to locate all available addresses.
Before any email is sent, we verify every address to protect your domain (and ours) from bounces. If we cannot verify an address, we do not contact that profile.
Prioritizing Personal vs. Work Emails
We prioritize deliverability and candidate experience:
We always prioritize personal email addresses (70% of contacts are personal) because candidates prefer them, and they offer higher delivery, open, and reply rates.
We only reach out to a work address if the personal address did not bring a reply.
Cascaded Email Outreach
To ensure we don't spam candidates:
When multiple addresses are found, we rank them by likelihood of delivery/reply.
We contact the highest-ranked email address first, wait 24 hours, and only contact the next-ranked email address if no reply is received. This process is followed for the entire 3-email sequence.
Understanding Email Statuses
On your job page, you can monitor the status of every email delivery:
Status Icon | Meaning |
Scheduled | Waiting to send the email at the best time in the candidate's local timezone. |
One Gray Checkbox | The email was sent. |
Two Gray Checkboxes | The email was successfully delivered. |
Two Green Checkboxes | The email was read by the profile. |
Green Click Icon | The profile clicked on a link in the email. |
Green Reply Arrow | The profile replied (response has not been tagged yet). |
Green Thumbs Up | The profile replied with interest in your job. |
Gray Thumbs Down | The profile replied with no interest in your job. |
Not Sent | The email was not sent because the candidate already replied or unsubscribed. |
4. Outreach Bad Practices
Practices that Harm Deliverability
Mistake | Why it Hurts |
Long Body/Subject Lines | Discourages passive candidates from reading them. |
All Caps or Excessive Numbers | Makes the email look unprofessional and spammy. |
Mentioning the word 'spam' | Increases the likelihood of being filtered into the spam folder. |
Multiple Languages | Confusing for candidates and creates mistrust. |
Bad Structure/Extra Lines | Makes the email look careless and difficult to read. |
Practices that Harm Candidate Experience
Including Application Links or Calendly Links: If a candidate replies outside of Visage, the email sequence will keep sending messages, which can be annoying and negatively affect their experience. Share contact information after they reply through Visage.
Forgetting to Preview: Always send a preview to yourself to ensure variables are working and the outreach is error-free.
Not Customizing Signature: A customized signature helps authenticate your identity and leverages your company's name recognition.
Practices that Harm Lead Rate
Follow-ups longer than 5 days: Shorten the time between follow-ups to keep engagement constant and increase the reply rate.
Removing the 2nd or 3rd follow-up: Statistically, these emails often generate the highest response rate.