You know you should send more recruiting messages, and every time you sit down to write one, you stare at a blank screen and send nothing. There are two reasons why people don't do social media. Number one, what am I going to talk about? Number two, I don't have time to write.
The same two problems stop most recruiting messages before they're written, and AI fixes both if you set it up right. Too much of recruiting is generic. It's not specific enough.
Most leaders paste a quick request into ChatGPT, copy what comes back, and wonder why nobody replies. They're throwing generic stuff in AI, they're asking how to produce it, and it devalues them. Because everyone, everybody else around them looks at it and goes, that's AI, why are sending that to me? Here are the four steps I teach leaders to get messages that sound like them.
1. Capture your voice first
The four Cs of AI that I teach are capture, context, co-create commands. But the first place every leader needs to start is with capture. Capture means getting your real words in one place: sent emails, texts to your team, LinkedIn posts, and recorded calls. You take some of those brilliant emails that you've created and that's part of your knowledge base. And AI can recognize patterns in your speech, can recognize things that you say repeatedly as a leader. And today, I think the smartest leaders always have an AI assistant at the table recording them.
2. Give it context about you
Next, tell the AI who you are, and personality profiles are the fastest way to do it. If you just take one of your personality profiles and store it in your AI, it gets dramatically better. You take five of them and it's like, how in the world is it using my language all of a sudden? Don't just say I'm an ENFP, say I'm a 67 percent E, a 73 percent F. That's deeper context, so it writes like you. You basically have for $20 a month, a ghostwriter that can write just like you, sound just like you.
3. Co-create, then save the command
It used to be you had to have perfect commands and the command was everything. Today you're just going to co-create. Treat it like a sharp assistant sitting next to you, and tell it plainly what you like and what you don't. I like it, I don't like it. Here's what I want you to do, here's what I don't want you to do. So I'm going to ideate with it before I ever ask it to create. Once a message comes out right, save the instructions that produced it so you never start over. The best person to give you the commands is AI. When I get somewhere and I'm like, this is brilliant and I want to recreate this, I say, give me the command that would recreate this. Now I can take that command and I can set it aside.
4. Build your four everyday messages
With your voice and a saved command, the messages you send most get fast, starting with the first touch. Most of you can probably take your data, and you can extract your data, and you can use that and input that into AI with a simple command that will tell you exactly where the affirmation lies. Best affirmation is core value character affirmation, not production affirmation. (The full first-call script that pairs with this message is in the loan officer recruiting script.) It can be something as simple as that, but the data is what is going to provide the one-off messaging and allow the scale around that. For follow-up, the shortest message is often the strongest one I send. My database, subject line, thought of you today. Two sentences. I'll get a 40% plus response rate on that message. And when someone has gone quiet, I ask the AI for a way back in. Give me a couple of lines to get re-engaged based off where we left off.
The human edit that makes it land
AI gets the message most of the way there, and you finish it. I don't like that dash. That dash is an AI flag. We don't want anyone to ever be able to tell that it's not you. We want it to sound like you. Read every message out loud before you send it, and if it doesn't sound like something you'd say on the phone, change it until it does. If you can give me specifics, it's no longer a generic call.
Quick answers on AI recruiting messages
Yes, once you give it samples of your own writing and your personality profiles. That’s deeper context, so it writes like you.
Lead with something specific you admire about the person’s character. Best affirmation is core value character affirmation, not production affirmation.
Ask for two short lines that pick up where you left off, then edit them in your voice. Give me a couple of lines to get re-engaged based off where we left off.
Read each one out loud and cut anything you wouldn’t say on a call, starting with dashes. That dash is an AI flag.