Recruiter Outreach Messaging That Actually Gets Replies
Recruiter outreach messaging is broken — and most recruiters don’t even know it. In this episode of GoHire Talks, Jonathan Duarte sits down with Mitch Sullivan, a seasoned recruiter turned copywriting trainer and AI job ad builder, to dig into why so much outreach fails, what a job ad is actually supposed to do, and how to write messages that passive candidates actually want to read.
Mitch has trained over 2,000 recruiters in copywriting and built an AI tool that writes job ads — not job descriptions — for recruiters who want better results without learning to write from scratch. His perspective is sharp, practical, and genuinely different from what most TA teams are doing today.
Key Topics Covered in This Episode
- The fundamental difference between a job description and a job ad
- Why most job ads talk about the company instead of the candidate
- The 3 biggest recruiter outreach messaging mistakes — and how to fix them
- “Lowering the cost of curiosity” — Mitch’s soft close philosophy
- How AI is inflating resume volume without improving candidate quality
- Quality over quantity — why small margins define great recruiting
- Why culture fit can be a proxy for bias
- The one question every recruiter should ask before writing a single word
Job Description vs. Job Ad: They Are Not the Same Thing
One of the most fundamental — and most ignored — distinctions in recruitment is the difference between a job description and a job ad. Mitch makes the case clearly: these are two different documents with two different purposes, and conflating them is costing recruiters response rates every day. Understanding the job description vs job ad distinction is step one in learning how to write a job ad that actually converts.
“A job description is an internal document. It’s generally written by compliance. There’s nothing in it that’s about the candidate or what the candidate might benefit. It’s all about the company and what the company wants.”
A job ad, by contrast, should be written for the reader — the candidate who isn’t looking, isn’t desperate, and needs a reason to care. Most job postings today are just dressed-up job descriptions: company first, requirements heavy, candidate value buried at the bottom (if it’s there at all). Mitch’s framework flips this. Lead with what’s in it for them. Make the company section earn its place.
The 3 Biggest Recruiter Outreach Messaging Mistakes
Why Recruiter Outreach Messaging So Often Falls Flat
Outreach fails for predictable reasons. After more than a decade of one-on-one coaching and group training, Mitch has seen the same patterns repeat across thousands of recruiters. Here are the three mistakes he sees most often:
- Too long. Messages crammed with 150–200 words of dense text get skimmed at best, ignored at worst — especially by passive candidates who have no pressing reason to engage.
- Company-focused, not candidate-focused. Most outreach is about what the recruiter or company wants. It doesn’t answer the question the candidate is silently asking: “What’s in this for me?”
- The hard close too early. Asking for a resume or a call in a first message is too much commitment, too soon — especially for someone who hasn’t even decided they’re interested yet.
The fix? Get short, get relevant, and get out of the way. Mitch’s approach is to keep the first message to 50–60 words, focus entirely on something the candidate would find interesting about their future, and close with nothing more than: “Would you like some more info?”
“Lowering the Cost of Curiosity” — The Soft Close Philosophy
Mitch’s most distinctive concept is one he coined himself, and it reframes what outreach is actually for.
“I’ve coined this phrase — lowering the cost of curiosity. That’s what an outreach message is. That’s their purpose: to get people to want to find out more. And that’s when the real recruiting starts.”
The goal of a first message isn’t to close a candidate. It’s to make it easy — effortless, even — for them to say yes to learning more. A soft close removes friction. It doesn’t ask for a resume. It doesn’t push for a call. It just opens a door. Once they walk through, that’s when the real conversation begins.
Mitch likens the full outreach sequence to a relay race: short bursts, each one handing off to the next, rather than one exhausting sprint that tries to do everything at once. This approach to passive candidate outreach respects where the candidate actually is in their decision-making — and converts far better as a result.
How AI Is Changing (and Complicating) Recruiter Outreach Messaging
AI is reshaping what lands in a recruiter’s inbox — and not always in the way you’d hope. Jonathan raised a scenario that’s becoming increasingly common: a recruiter sorting through 100 applications only to discover that the resumes look better than ever, but the actual candidate quality hasn’t improved. The resumes are polished by AI. The people behind them may not be the right fit at all.
“Clearly the majority of those people aren’t even reading the ad.”
On the outreach side, the saturation problem is just as real. Auto-bot services are blasting candidates with messages that follow the same flattery-first formula — “I was impressed by your background” — which candidates recognize immediately as templated spam. Mitch’s response to all of this is to do the opposite: write like a human being, keep it short, make it relevant, and speak to the candidate’s self-interest rather than your own agenda.
Quality Over Quantity: Why Small Margins Define Great Recruiting
The recruitment industry has long been obsessed with volume — more applications, more outreach, more touchpoints. Mitch pushes back on this directly. The difference between a good job ad and a bad one might only be five additional applicants. But those five are the ones who wouldn’t have applied otherwise. That’s the margin that matters.
“It’s small margins. It always is in recruitment. Every contact point is about small margins.”
For hard-to-fill roles where the talent pool is tiny — maybe 40 or 50 people in the entire country — burning a candidate with a bad message isn’t just a missed opportunity. It could end the search. Mitch spends days crafting outreach for senior roles precisely because the margin for error is that narrow.
Culture Fit: A Proxy for Bias?
In a candid moment, Mitch revisited something he said years ago on a recruitment podcast that drew significant pushback at the time — and he still stands behind it.
“Culture is just a proxy for bias and prejudice. I still think that in a lot of cases, I really do. It’s such a difficult thing to measure or quantify.”
His preferred alternative: identify two or three non-negotiable skills, knowledge areas, or experiences the candidate absolutely must have to do the job. Everyone presented to the client has those three things. Everything else — culture, personality, “fit” — is the hiring manager’s call. It’s a cleaner, more defensible process, and it removes a lot of the subjective fog that slows decisions and introduces risk.
The One Question Every Recruiter Should Ask Before Writing a Word of Recruiter Outreach Messaging
Mitch saved the sharpest insight for last. Before writing a job ad, before building an outreach sequence, before doing anything — he says there’s one question recruiters need to sit with until they get a real answer.
“Good recruiting starts from the point where the recruiter says to the hiring manager: why might somebody who’s doing a similar job to this one in another company want to quit that job to come and work here? And then the next one to speak loses.”
That answer — whatever it is — becomes the foundation of every piece of recruiter outreach messaging that follows. It’s the “what’s in it for the candidate” that most job ads completely skip. When you know why someone would genuinely leave a stable job to take this one, you can write copy that speaks to that. Everything else is just noise.
The GoHire Talks Interview Transcript with Mitch Sullivan
Jonathan Duarte: Okay, everyone, I think we’ve got a really special guest today that you’re gonna really appreciate — Mitch Sullivan. I gotta tell you, I think I’ve met the most interesting man in recruitment marketing.
[00:00:19] Jonathan Duarte: Mitch is a copywriter — which I know most recruiters are like, what the heck is that? But it’s actually something I think is extremely important in today’s market. Mitch, why don’t you say hi?
[00:00:33] Mitch Sullivan: Yeah, hi. Let me just correct you if you don’t mind. I’m a recruiter who has become quite good at copywriting.
[00:00:40] Mitch Sullivan: I self-identify as a recruiter. I don’t work on as many jobs as I used to — maybe two or three a year — because I’ve built a training and an AI business as well. I’m not a copywriter trying to infiltrate the market.
[00:01:16] Jonathan Duarte: Let’s talk about how we met — there was a conversation on LinkedIn about ads and job descriptions. If you start with a bad job description and then layer AI on top, all you’re getting is bad output.
[00:01:53] Mitch Sullivan: I’ve been in recruitment slightly longer than you. I was in sales recruitment. I just always took the selling part of recruitment seriously. I always understood that you have to get people’s attention if they’re gonna even read what you’ve written.
[00:02:21] Mitch Sullivan: About 10, 11 years ago, I started a training business called Copywriting for Recruiters. It grew very quickly. We trained over 2,000 people across five years. I launched it online in 2020 and then revenue doubled every year.
[00:03:18] Mitch Sullivan: I took the decision to pivot the entire business into an AI product. I put everything — every single piece of collateral and resource and thinking — into building this AI that writes job ads for people rather than teaches them how to do it.
[00:04:00] Mitch Sullivan: The job description and the job ad are two completely different things. People only want to read a job description if it’s about a job they’re already interested in. The purpose of the job ad is to get them to want to read the job description.
[00:04:54] Mitch Sullivan: A job description is an internal document. It’s generally written by compliance. There’s nothing in it that’s about the candidate or what the candidate might benefit. It’s all about the company and what the company wants.
[00:05:19] Mitch Sullivan: Nearly all job postings start by talking about the company and how great it is. The assumption is that the company is going to be the most attractive thing about the job — which just isn’t true. What people are thinking is: how might this improve my life? How might this improve my career?
[00:07:38] Mitch Sullivan: The three biggest mistakes a lot of recruiters make in their outreach messaging: number one, they’re too long. Number two, it’s nearly always about what the company wants, not what the reader might want. And then the hard close — ‘Can you send me a resume? Can we jump on a call?’ — which is too much to ask of a passive candidate.
[00:08:38] Mitch Sullivan: My approach: make the first message so short that just by looking at it, they can’t do anything but read it. So it’s like 50, 60 words. And then put a soft close in it, which is simply: ‘Would you like some more info?’
[00:09:10] Mitch Sullivan: I’ve coined this phrase — lowering the cost of curiosity. That’s what an outreach message is. That’s their purpose: to get people to want to find out more. And that’s when the real recruiting starts.
[00:10:10] Mitch Sullivan: The industry has been obsessed with quantity over quality for a long time. And it’s not gonna change anytime soon.
[00:12:38] Mitch Sullivan: Clearly the majority of those people aren’t even reading the ad. They’re using some kind of auto-bot service that just scans jobs, matches their CV, and pumps it out.
[00:13:00] Mitch Sullivan: My approach has been: I’m just gonna talk like a human being. Make it as easy as possible to want to find out more. Prize out those four or five people who wouldn’t otherwise have even bothered reading the ad.
[00:14:27] Mitch Sullivan: Structurally, my job ads start by only talking about what’s in it for the candidate, and then the second half is what they’d be doing, what they’ll need, who they’d be doing it for. The outreach sequence is the 100-meter relay.
[00:15:19] Mitch Sullivan: I’m seeing a lot of recruiters abandon job advertising and switch to purely outreach. That worries me. Outreach is already a saturated market. But if you’re doing your research properly, recruiters should be able to get a 30-ish percent positive response rate.
[00:19:23] Mitch Sullivan: Culture is just a proxy for bias and prejudice. I still think that in a lot of cases, I really do. My approach: solidify the two or three must-have, non-negotiable skills this person would need to do this job. That’s what I take to market and that’s what I assess against.
[00:22:28] Mitch Sullivan: The difference between a good job ad and a bad job ad could be the difference between 80 applications and 85. But those additional five are people who would never have bothered with the first one. It’s small margins. It always is in recruitment.
[00:26:38] Mitch Sullivan: Good recruiting starts from the point where the recruiter says to the hiring manager: ‘Why might somebody who’s doing a similar job to this one in another company want to quit that job to come and work here?’ And then the next one to speak loses.
[00:27:28] Jonathan Duarte: Wow. Great wisdom. That’s 30 years of wisdom right there in 10 seconds. Thank you so much, Mitch.
[00:27:42] Mitch Sullivan: Good to spend some time with you, Jonathan. Thank you.
Connect with Mitch Sullivan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchsullivan/