Emailing from work is a high risk endeavor especially now that company’s are required to store all company emails. Right on cue, CareerBuilder.com offers Netiquette: The Niceties Of Workplace Email Use. They quote a survey with a rather small sample size, but there is a surprising statistic:

A 2006 survey of 416 companies by the ePolicy Institute in Columbus, Ohio, concludes that 26% of them have fired employees for inappropriate email conduct. That’s up from 21% in 2001.

I have seen some egregious emails come from corporate email accounts. I have also dealt with many candidates who use their company email to converse with me regarding a job opportunity. I am surprised everytime that happens.

At any rate, there are some good tips in the short article. First, something I subscribe to wholeheartedly:

Be professional. You are not a teenager — avoid the little smiley face “emoticons,” abbreviations, or too many exclamation marks, etc. Keep your tone respectful and friendly.

I truly despise those emoticon things – leave them for the teenagers using instant messaging.

Second:

Don’t let email become a substitute for face-to-face communications. Sometimes an in-person or phone talk is more fruitful than an endless chain of emails.

That topic is one we addressed in this post from last week. I am an avid fan of email, but many times a phone conversation or face-to-face meeting is far more effective.

This topic is quite timely – I am writing this post while sitting in a video conference room of one of our customers. We have a break in our meetings and one of the offhand topics that came up was employee emails. They have been working with their salespeople to ensure that they send out professional, properly-worded emails to their customers. Their experience has been simple – poorly-worded emails cast their company in a bad light. A bad light that their customers have graciously shared with them.

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I’ve been reading up on articles that are discussing how to use email for prospecting as opposed to the traditional cold call. The process has some merit since email has become so ubiquitous and accessible(BlackBerries, PDA cell phones, etc.). The cold call is an interruption in the prospect’s day no matter what time you reach them. Caller ID tied to voicemail provides a great screening tool for prospects.

Email has a unique property to it – people do not view it as an interruption since they can check it at times that are convenient for them. Also, most people still enjoy receiving emails. I know spam is an issue, but there are plenty of tools to filter most of those messages.

So this gradual transformation for prospecting provides a new twist when sourcing salespeople. First off, I doubt there will ever be a time when the phone screen becomes extinct. The ability to hear a candidate on the phone and observe their communication abilities in real time is too valuable to ignore. A question and answer phone screen does not allow the candidate to research the web and formulate strategic answers. They have to respond at the pace of the discussion.

Yet we have now incorporated email into our screening process. As important as the phone screen is, email screening has become a close secondary screen. The candidate’s written words reveal their level of communication proficiency in the second most important media for customer interactions.

How to screen writing ability:

1. Email Cover Letters. I make a stink about this topic all the time but it is the first glimpse of the candidate’s writing ability. I viewed one email cover this morning where the candidate did not capitalize their sentences. Seriously – looked like this:
   

   i am interested in an outside sales position. i have been working….

   I read it and immediately envisioned a 12 year old typing at a keyboard. Can you imagine if that went out to a customer? Observe their writing when they send in their resume.

2. Electronic Dialogue. We have yet to source a sales candidate where email was not involved. At some point in the screening process, you will dialogue with them via email. I like to critique these interactions closely. Sentence structure, verb tense, punctuation, even spelling (heaven forbid there are many errors) are all revealed. I also pay attention to how formal vs. casual they appear in their message. Email is a relatively casual medium but job hunting is formal – watch for their ability to balance these polar opposites.
3. Written Screening Questions. For some positions, we email out a handful of questions and ask candidates to respond to them. They know it is a written screen, but we still get some interesting responses. We purposely keep the questions broadly stated so that we can see how the candidate approaches the topic and boils it down to their “thesis.” I have literally read some responses where I could not track their thought process . . . at all. Most candidates get in trouble here because they attempt to dial up their vocabulary. Their use of clearly unfamiliar words wreaks havoc on their ability to communicate ideas.
4. Inperson Writing Assessments. We have a couple of customers who have candidates sit at a PC in their conference room and write a response to a couple of, for lack of a better word, essay questions. I like this approach because it is proctored so you know the candidate is the author. Second, there is pressure added to this format. Candidates who excel in this situation normally have excellent writing ability.

If you complete some or all of these steps, the candidate’s writing ability will be clearly defined. As email becomes more prevalent than telephone calls, the written screening process will become integral to any repeatably successful hiring process.

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