Time For Recruiters To Take The Email Challenge

Are you feeling the stress of there just not being enough hours in the work day? Then it might be time to consider taking the challenge of freeing yourself from your email. There is no denying the important tool that email is for today’s recruiter, but even the best of us can get caught up in compulsive inboxing. We lose valuable time clicking refresh on the Inbox over and over waiting for that response. We can also get caught up in endless back and forth due to things lost in translation.  For recruiters time is not always our friend and time lost with email is time that could be spent making more calls.

This may not be a radical new idea, but one that recruiters might dismiss as being a silly concept. Afterall we need to constantly be in touch with our candidates and clients, but how often are you checking your email on any given day? What is all of that intermittent activity cost in terms of lost output?

There are a variety of things you can do to reduce time spent with email to see an increase in your overall productivity. Examples like not using your Inbox as a to-do list, avoid starting the day with email, and refraining from all email activity on weekends. Another suggestion that was made by a colleague is to break your sessions up into two categories- blocks for reading emails and blocks for sending emails.

All great tips, but the challenge in the title of this post is to take the first step of simply creating a  schedule of daily blocks of time to get caught up on emails in your work day. Of course this is easier said than done and I would add that it takes a fair amount of discipline to keep in place,  but the benefits are well worth it. You will find that rather than being in typical recruiter ‘reaction’ mode, you will be in more control of the day and have additional time to make calls and establish new contacts.

So Recruiters ready for the challenge? Try it for one week and let RD know how you make out. Also feel free to share tips you might have to prevent email from becoming your job.

Helpful links on this topic:
Email Overloaded
4-Hour Workweek
SLATE

By Tim Spagnola