Why your recruitment campaign is getting no responses
If your outbound recruitment is not getting replies, the problem is rarely the market.
The problem is that you are not filtering hard enough.
Too many SaaS sales leaders and recruiters still send long, over-written messages that try to explain everything upfront. In 2026, those messages will not get read.
They get ignored or sent straight to spam.
Here’s how to do it right 👇
Long messages do not signal quality. They signal risk.
When a candidate opens a long message, two things happen:
They assume you are about to waste their time
They stop reading
In outbound recruitment, length is not helpful.
We have sent 1000’s of recruitment messages in 2025 with a 62% reply rate. Not by spending ten minutes on personalisation. Not by using buzzwords like hypergrowth or unicorn, but by keeping it short.
Treat recruitment outreach like a cold call
Good salespeople understand this instinctively.
You do not open a cold call with a five-minute pitch. You open with permission. You earn the right to continue.
Recruitment messages should work the same way.
Short. Clear. Permission-based.
Respect the candidate’s time first. Pitch second.
Filtering is not exclusion. It is positioning.
Many leaders try to maximise reach. They believe more words and more context will increase conversion.
The opposite is true.
When you keep your message short, you force clarity. You filter out people who are not interested. You attract those who are.
That is why this approach works. It does not chase attention. It earns it.
The takeaway
If your recruitment campaign is getting no responses, stop rewriting the pitch.
Rewrite the opener.
Short, permission-based messages outperform clever personalisation every time.