As a recruiter and HR professional your inbox is your communication tool and can sometimes work its way into the hundreds of received emails daily. The proper mix of Email Tools can impact your productivity. Make your life easier by following the 7 hacks listed below. Some are tools and others are techniques.

Here are 3 easy to install practices to help alleviate your inbox hell:

Email Hack 1:  Install a follow up system that is unique to your inbox:

Regardless of which email client you are using there is always going to be an opportunity for you to set tasks on incoming messages. If your inbox is like my inbox you are receiving 100+ messages a day. This can get messy rather quickly.

Steps to take action:

Some email clients will allow you to right click on the email message and set a task reminder or follow up. If this is the case with your inbox than you are set. Simply add a task to the important messages you need to follow up with.

If however your inbox does not allow the famous right click you can…

Create a filter in your inbox (gmail for me) that takes a designated keyword from every subject line and places an action on that new incoming message. You will need to BCC yourself on actionable emails that require a follow up and make sure your filter is included to pull all BCC emails into a follow up folder for daily monitoring.

Email Hack 2:  Use your email subject lines to call back action items in a later search:

Action words can make the most congested inbox simple to navigate. I like to use my subject line to include action words pertaining to the importance of that particular email.

I have created a list of actions that make sense in my inbox, for example:

  • Action Required:
  • Call:
  • Owed:
  • Opportunity:
  • Meeting:

After the action word, I than add my subject line. In the future should I need to recall that message I can search my action terms and the person I sent the email to for a quick and easy find.

Subject line example: Meeting: Are you free to have a call…

If needed, I will recall the message by searching my sent mail for” “meeting NAME OF PERSON”

Email Hack 3: Twice repeated equals automation in my life

Depending on the inbox that you are using, you may or may not have the ability to use this hack. Using Gmail I am able to take advantage of basic automation. My rule is that if I am repeating a task twice and the need is there for more explanation, I try to automate all or part of that response.

You can do this by creating multiple signatures that are used for specific reasons. Signatures are not limited to your name and contact information. You can create an entire email response, for example to respond to FAQ’s. I do not recommend creating a signature that sounds canned. You can still be very personal in your response using this technique.

Simply select the signature at the time of your email reply, edit the message if needed and send away. You response time is minimized, the other party is happy and your time is not drained on time wasting tasks.

Here are 5 Top Email Extensions To Help With Automation

Vibe {Submitted from @DeanDaCosta}

Vibe is an easy to use people research tool. You can use Vibe to find the person behind any email address. After installing the Vibe Chrome, Mac, iPhone or Outlook app, with a simple hover or click on any email address, you can find all information about the person in less than 3 seconds.

From an email address, Vibe will find Name, designation, Work History, Social Media handle, Topics of Interest and more.

What can I use Vibe for?

Majority of our users are sales, business development and recruitment professionals. If you are a person who receive/see a lot of emails every day, Vibe can help you in people research. Vibe makes it very simple to research any email address.

Vibe helps you be better informed about your leads, prospects or contacts.

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XOBNI {Submitted from @DeanDaCosta}

Xobni (the word ‘inbox’ spelled backwards) makes your inbox and address book smarter. First launching to the public in 2008, Xobni and its Smartr product suite, discover all the people you’ve ever emailed, called or texted, and creates complete and social profiles that are instantly searchable.

Profiles include a:

  • Photo
  • Job title
  • Company details
  • Email history as well as updates from your contacts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

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Grexit

GrexIt turns your email into a simple, powerful collaboration tool, providing a central hub for sharing files via labels and notes. It’s different than Drive so it’s worth mentioning as a recommended tool to review.

GrexIt gives you Shared Labels and Shared Notes in your Gmail, which help supercharge your email and enable your to do project management, customer support and sales without ever having to leave their inboxes.

grexit

EverContact

We’ve shared this tool previously but t’s worth mentioning again in this list because it’s an easy way to keep you address book and phone contacts up to date in your Gmail account.

The tool simply scans the signature file of your email conversations, references that data against your current address book and updates all existing contacts with the appended data.

Evercontact in a nutshell

  • Launched in 2011 under the name WriteThat.name.
  • Evercontact analyzes emails to extract useful nuggets of business/contact information.  It has expanded from Gmail to Google Apps, Outlook, Highrise and Salesforce while adding extended features like Flashback, AddMe and more.
  • Since September 26th, Evercontact has been available as a chrome extension, expanding the magic of the service to the entire web.
  • Since its launch in 2011, over 1 billion emails have been analyzed, allowing users to manage over 400 million new or updated contacts.

evercontact

 

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By Ryan Leary

Ryan Leary helps create the processes, ideas and innovation that drives RecruitingDaily. He’s our in-house expert for anything related to sourcing, tools or technology. A lead generation and brand buzz building machine, he has built superior funnel systems for some of the industries top HR Tech and Recruitment brands. He is a veteran to the online community and a partner here at RecruitingDaily.