How to Ensure Smooth Email Reception During Recruitment

Hiring season is always a tough time for hiring managers. After all, there are only so many jobs, and there are way too many job applicants. 

It is easy for many applications to get lost in the hubbub of emails that a hiring manager has to deal with. How many times have you experienced looking in the junk folder for an important email? Quite frequently, I assume, because it is not that uncommon. 

A similar problem occurs during recruitment as well. Any number of emails from aspiring applicants can be lost simply because they got put in the spam folder or never reached their destination. 

Today, we are going to learn what companies and hiring managers can do to mitigate this issue and improve the email reception process.

Methods of Ensuring Smooth Email Reception During Recruitment

1. Whitelist Job Application Platforms

When you are in the midst of hiring, your email service must be accepting emails from job application platforms. Many email service providers (ESPs) will automatically block emails from unknown sources or spammy sources.

The way the job market is now, a company might get tons of emails from job application platforms. It is possible they can get flagged as spam and get blocked. This can lead to lost opportunities for your company to hire a great employee.

So, when you are hiring, be sure to whitelist job application platforms so that you don’t miss out on any great hires.

2. Create Inbox Rules for Job Applications

Inbox rules are tools that you can use to automatically sort your emails in a specific way. During hiring season, you can modify your inbox rules to ensure that emails from job applicants are appearing at the top of your list. 

You can make it so that emails with specific text (keywords) in them are sorted and appear at the top of your inbox. 

Of course, this also means that your job applicants must use those keywords in their email subject lines. So, you must state that applicants must use the specific keywords in their job application email in the job post. 

This way, you will get emails from attentive applicants who have read your job postings carefully. 

3. Check Your Spam/Junk Folder Regularly

We mentioned previously that emails from unknown sources tend to get dropped into the spam/junk folder. Since the personal email of a candidate is not affiliated with a company or email service provider, your email service may put their correspondence into the junk folder.

So, during hiring season, you should ensure that you check your junk folder daily. This way, you will catch any emails from candidates that applied for the job. 

Keep in mind this can happen even if the candidate used the right keywords in their subject line. So, don’t overlook the junk/spam folder.

4. Setup Your MX Records Properly

Personal email accounts have hidden limits for sending and receiving emails. It is just that a single person never has to send or receive thousands of emails per month; as such, they never run into those limits.

This is precisely why large corporations that engage in digital marketing use email service providers. Depending on the package you have subscribed to, you could send or receive thousands of emails per day.

However, when you use a 3rd party email service provider to handle your emails, you need to set up a specific kind of DNS record called an MX record.

MX stands for mail exchange. MX records highlight which email servers will accept emails for a domain (your website). This server belongs to the email service provider whose services you have bought.

Without an MX record, other email service providers won’t know where to send your emails, thus dropping them, and you won’t even know it.

Setting up the domain records is the duty of the domain manager. Whether it is you or someone else, they have a responsibility to create accurate records. MX records are particularly easy to create because your email service provider will give them to you; you just need to copy and paste them into the right place.

So, when the records are published, it is recommended that you do an MX record lookup using dns-lookup.net to ensure they are correct and don’t have any spelling errors. You will know they are correct because they will match the ones provided by the ESP.

5. Review Security Software Settings For Attachments

Another problem that can hinder email reception is security software. Firewalls and antivirus software will frequently block attachments in an email and prevent them from downloading for safety reasons. 

However, since a job applicant will send you their CV in a document format, such blocking will prevent you from checking those CVs. 

To prevent this problem, you will need to review your email security settings and add exceptions for attachments. However, do not create exceptions for all attachments, as that is very insecure. Instead, only exclude Word and PDF file formats from getting blocked, as those are the major formats used for CVs.

Conclusion

So, there you have five methods for improving the email reception of job applications. 

Applying these tips will make it more convenient for you to find and read these emails. You will also improve the number of emails that find themselves in your inbox.