Outreach Guidelines
How to represent yourself when reaching out to candidates & your relationship with companies on Paraform
By Jeffrey Li
If you’re a recruiter, especially if you have experience doing agency, contingency, or freelance recruiting, you probably thought about your outreach message to candidates a lot - hundreds of iterations on your cold email copy, the best subject line for high open rates, best InMail message for conversion etc.
This article will briefly touch on that topic, but we believe you are already subject matter experts on this. What this article will mainly focus on is outreach guidelines specific to recruiting on Paraform. Please also note that any you candidate you submit to a role on Paraform must be opted in and interested in the role.
How to represent yourself & your relationship with companies
You probably wondered how sourcing & outreach works on Paraform. From a legal/contract standpoint. You are a recruiter (user) on Paraform and the companies hiring on Paraform have an recruiting agreement with Paraform (similar to how Airbnb works). This is great for both sides because Paraform is in a good position to resolve situations and handle liabilities.
What this does mean is also that you’re not an employee or contractor for the companies/hiring manager, so when reaching out, please avoid mentioning that you’re working at said company.
Instead, here are some examples you can take inspiration from:
“I work with early stage VC backed startups in the (industry_name)…”
“I’m working with (company_name)…”
“I’m collaborating with (company_name) to help them find a founding engineer…”
If you look at the last example, you can see how it mentions Paraform. We have been receiving positive feedback form recruiters saying that it was much easier to communicate with candidates when they were being transparent that they are a recruiter on Paraform working with early stage startups.
Candidates also get a notification from Paraform when you submit them for the role to confirm interest so they are aware.
If you’re concerned that candidates will find out about the bounty or the platform and submit themselves, please do not worry.
We have a system in place to check when you contacted, saved, or submitted a candidate and issues get resolved.
The platform is also not designed for candidates to sign up and start using it. Our team has a vetting process so only professional recruiters and talent folks get access.
Being professional when representing a company
When reaching out to candidates, you have the responsibility to be as professional as possible on behalf of the company you’re representing.
Please make sure to avoid the following:
- Spelling the company name wrong or mixing it up. E.g. company name is Siro but you spell it ‘Ciro’ or company goes by Character AI but you call it ‘Character Artificial Intelligence’
- To our surprise, for even the most experienced recruiters in the industry, this happened more frequently than expected. We suspect it’s due to the shorter intake period than other forms of recruiting, but please make sure to thoroughly read your dashboard before you get started - it contains enough information for you to get started on your search.
- Having spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in your outreach message
- Low quality outreach message that fails to meet the standards of what a reasonable hiring managers at the company would send out.
- Communicating incorrect information or misleading candidates
- Please only communicate information provided by the hiring manager, nothing else.
- If in doubt, you have the ability to ask questions to the hiring manager - click ‘Client Chat’ on your dashboard. Before you do, please make sure to read through the information on your dashboard once more - the information you’re looking for will most often than not be there.
Being unprofessional not only hurts your chances of getting the candidate to be interested in the role, but also will hurt the employer brand/reputation of the company you’re representing.
Any conduct deemed unprofessional reported by the company you’re representing or identified through Paraform can result in rescission from the role or immediate account suspension.
It is your responsibility to be respectful when communicating with candidates
- Please prioritize candidate experience.
- If you’re communicating a rejection reason from the hiring manager, please be respectful of the candidate’s time and thank them for taking interest in the role. Hiring managers pass on most candidates because they are not a good fit for the role, not because they are bad candidates overall