What Recruiting Leaders Need to Know About Upcoming Gmail and Yahoo Changes

Google and Yahoo have announced changes aimed at reducing spam emails. This new policy will impact many recruiting teams so it's important to prepare before it goes into effect. The changes are summarized in this article from Google but we’ll cover everything you need to know here.  

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Who is impacted?

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This policy will impact companies that are deemed “bulk senders.” Google defines a bulk sender as any company that sends over 5,000 emails per day to email addresses that end with gmail.com or googlemail.com. 

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Yahoo is also following suit but hasn’t defined what it considers a bulk sender. 

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When will the change happen?

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Google has only shared that it will start in February 2024 so companies should make the necessary changes to their email strategy by the end of January.

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What do we need to do?

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1. Authenticate your email. Most companies probably already have this set up but now is a good time to double check. Here’s how to authenticate your email.

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2. Enable easy unsubscribe and process unsubscribes within two days: Google will require one-click unsubscription and that unsubscribed contacts be removed from your database and stop receiving emails within two days. I highly recommend that recruiting leaders look into this, as the majority of emails I unsubscribe from are not compliant with one-click unsubscribe. 

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3. Stop sending spam: Google will start penalizing companies that consistently average a spam rate of .3% (only three out of 1,000 people would need to mark your email as spam to hit this rate). This will require many companies to take their candidate database hygiene more seriously and up their email writing game. 

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What else can we do?

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Now is a good time to diversify communication. Some companies may look to cut back on the amount of emails they send to their candidate database. This will push recruiters to rely more on LinkedIn messages for certain roles, however, many candidates are not on LinkedIn. We may also see more spam LinkedIn messages. 

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Another way to connect with candidates is through text message or WhatsApp—both for 1:1 messaging and mass outreach campaigns. Text and WhatsApp messages typically have a 98% open rate, 45% response rate, and an average response time of 5-10 minutes. Now is the perfect time for any recruiting team that doesn’t have a texting platform to make a case for one.

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To mitigate risk, companies may also consider using different email domains and servers for specific purposes. For example, let’s say your primary domain is abccompany.com, IT could create a domain like abccompanyjobs.com specifically for recruiting. At Sense, we categorize our emails based on the customer’s content subscription and send them from different domains. 

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If your recruiting team sends over 100,000 emails per month, your IT team might end up creating multiple domains that are used for different geographies or types of roles.

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What will happen to companies that don’t adapt?

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Google and Yahoo have said deliverability will be impacted for those companies that fail to update their email settings and maintain a low spam score. For serious violators, they will be blocked from sending emails to recipients who use these email platforms. This could be detrimental to recruiting but also could impact broader business operations, especially for B2C companies whose customers primarily use Gmail and Yahoo.