Four touches in one week, then a call

Four emails with different copy inside a single week, a gated phone call on day three, and a close on day seven. Every rung has a deadline, and a late one is cancelled rather than sent.

The email that was never going to be enough

Most outreach to a passive candidate is one message. It is written carefully, it is sent to somebody who was not expecting it, and it arrives in a working week that has nothing to do with your role. Then it is quiet, and the quiet gets read as a decision.

It usually is not one. A good candidate who never replied to a single email has, in most cases, not weighed the opportunity and declined it. They saw the subject line on a bad morning, or they did not see it at all.

We changed it because we measured it

This is not a theory about human attention. An earlier version of our cadence was short: one email, a brief wait, then the candidate was written off as unreachable. Run across real roles, that ladder closed the overwhelming majority of candidates as unreachable.

The correction was not clever. Adding nothing more than a second touch still produced replies from people the first ladder had already given up on, which settled the argument. If one more message recovers candidates, the first ladder was not measuring interest. It was measuring whether somebody happened to be at their desk.

A candidate who never replied to one email has usually not decided anything. Silence after four different messages and a call is worth reading.

The shape of the week

Four email touches inside a single week, then a call, then a close. Laid out by day, it runs like this:

1. Day 0 — the first email. The role, why this person specifically, and a way to reply.
2. Day 1 — a follow-up on the same thread. Short, on the original message, so it reads as a continuation rather than a second stranger.
3. Day 3 — a new angle. A different reason the role might matter to them, not a restatement of the first one.
4. Day 3 — the call. A phone conversation, gated rather than automatic.
5. Day 5 — a final note. Brief, and honest that it is the last one.
6. Day 7 — close. The candidate is concluded on this role rather than left in an indefinite maybe.

Four touches, four pieces of copy

Each of the four emails is written differently. Not a resend with a new subject line, and not the same paragraph prefixed with a polite apology for writing again.

There are two reasons for that, and only one of them is about reply rates. The first is that a candidate who ignored the first message ignored the argument in it, so repeating the argument asks them to make the same decision twice. The second is that a visibly automated sequence tells the candidate exactly how much thought went into contacting them, and that impression outlives the role.

The call is a rung, not an escalation

The phone call sits inside the week rather than after it, on the same day as the third email. Reaching someone by voice on day three while the thread is still recent is a different conversation from calling a fortnight later about a message they have forgotten.

It is gated. A call is the most intrusive thing in the ladder and the only one the candidate cannot skim, so it runs on a role only where that has been chosen rather than assumed.

Every rung has its own deadline

A cadence with a shape needs the shape to be real, and the way sequences lose their shape is drift. A queue backs up, a send is retried, and the day-one follow-up goes out on day four, behind the day-three message, to somebody who now has three emails in two days.

So each touch carries its own due moment. A touch that is well past it is cancelled rather than sent late. The candidate does not receive a week-old “just following up” about a message they have no memory of, and the ladder either runs in the shape it was designed in or it stops.

• Late is worse than never. A message out of order tells the candidate the sender is not paying attention, which is the one thing outreach cannot afford to say.
• The week stays a week. Four touches compressed into a sensible span is a considered approach; the same four spread over a month is nagging.
• A cancelled rung is visible. It is recorded as cancelled, so a thin week of touches is something you can see rather than something you infer.

What you get at the end of it

Seven days after the first email, every candidate contacted for the role has an outcome. They replied, they were spoken to, or they went through four different messages and a call without responding.

That last group is a real finding rather than an absence of one, and it is the number worth acting on. A role where people are answering and declining has a pitch problem. A role where nobody answers a full ladder usually has a targeting problem, and no amount of rewriting the first email will fix it.

How to use it

1. Read the four emails for a role before it runs. They are meant to be four arguments, and if two of them say the same thing the ladder is shorter than it looks.
2. Decide about the call deliberately. It is the rung with the most upside and the most intrusion, and it should be a choice rather than a default you inherited.
3. Judge the role on the full ladder, not on the first email. Day-zero silence is not information; day-seven silence across four touches and a call is.