Given the fact that a majority of people:
- Don’t pick up the phone unless they recognize the phone # (myself included
). - Are addicted to their mobile media device (aka – smart phone)!
I would bet a good majority of your candidate prospects are receiving your “first contact” on their smart phone while at their desk, sitting in a meeting, at the coffee shop, etc.
During a session on Monday, I received a great question from Ryan that honestly . . . I haven’t spent a ton of time researching.
“When sending an “Attention Grabber” email (Crafting and Delivering an “Attention Grabber”), how does it look when it is displayed on your mobile phone?”
My colleague (and our self-proclaimed resident “recruiting geek”), Mike McLean, had some excellent advice that I thought I would share with you all:
That is a great question. Having a uniform email that will display exactly the same on all smart phones would be extremely difficult (due to personal configurations, overrides, system setup/parameters, etc.). But there are a few things you can do to ensure that your emails will look the same to as many folks as possible:
- Write all of your emails in Arial. Arial is the default font for most applications and most people don’t change their settings off of it. The 2nd most popular is Tahoma but not as many applications use it as a default.
- Compose your emails in Rich Text Format (also known as RTF) or HTML not text. RTF is the most common language used in word processing software so this will cause the least amount of issues. If you are sending an email as HTML it is being sent just as it would present/look on a Webpage whereas if using RTF your email would look the same whether it was an email, word doc or webpage etc. This means that an email in RTF is less likely to have its formatting changed when being read on different formats.
- Always send a test email to yourself and check it on your phone as well.
If you have any other great advice to share on this topic, please let me know!





