Sequences

Build a multi-step outreach campaign — emails, texts, phone screens and your own tasks — that follows up on a schedule and stops the moment someone replies.

A sequence is a short campaign you run against a list of people: a first message now, a follow-up in three days, a text a week later, and so on. InsightHire sends each step on time, respects your sending rules, and stops the whole thing for anyone who answers.

Open Network → Sequences. If you do not see it, ask your InsightHire contact to enable sequences for your organization.

Sequences are for outreach and nurture — silver medalists, past applicants, people you sourced. Messages tied to a hiring stage (journey invitations, rejections, interview invites) are configured under Hiring → Emails instead.

Create a sequence

1. Choose New sequence.
2. Give it a name you will recognize later, for example "Silver medalists Q3".
3. Write the first step. It is sent immediately when someone is added.
4. Choose Create draft.

A new sequence starts as a Draft. Nothing is sent until you activate it.

Add steps

1. Open the sequence and choose Edit steps.
2. Choose Add step.
3. Under Send as, pick the channel for that step.
4. For every step after the first, set how long to wait — Wait n days n hours — measured from the previous step.
5. Fill in the step's content (below).
6. Choose Save.

You can reorder nothing after the fact: steps run top to bottom in the order you create them. Delete a step with the trash icon next to it. A sequence must keep at least one step.

What each channel does

Use {{candidate_first_name}} anywhere in a subject or body to drop in the person's first name.

Text message steps show a live counter — "142/600 characters · 1 segment" — and warn you when a message runs past two segments, because long texts cost more and read worse. Opt-out text is added automatically, so do not write your own.

AI phone screen steps call the candidate when the step comes due, using the consent basis you record under Sending rules. A call is skipped if the person has no phone number on file or already has a call scheduled.

Let InsightHire draft the text

On Email, Text message and Task for me steps, pick a tone — Friendly, Direct or Formal — and choose Write it for me. InsightHire writes a draft for that channel and step position, using the earlier steps for continuity and your own recent messages so it sounds like you. Read it, edit it, and keep what you would have written anyway. It is a first draft, not a send-it-blind button.

Set the sending rules

Open Edit steps and scroll to Sending rules.

• Only send between — a quiet-hours window, on by default and set to 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM. Steps that come due outside the window wait until it opens.
• Time zone — Candidate's time zone (default) uses the time zone on the candidate's record. Pick a fixed zone (Eastern, Central, Mountain, Arizona, Pacific, Alaska or Hawaii) if you would rather everyone be treated the same. When neither the candidate nor the sequence has a time zone, Eastern is used.
• Don't start this sequence for anyone contacted by another sequence in the last n days — the contact cooldown, 30 days by default. It stops two of your own campaigns landing on the same person in the same month.
• Stop automatically when the candidate replies — on by default. Leave it on.
• Consent basis for automated phone screens — required before you can save or activate a sequence that contains a phone screen step. Write the plain reason you may call these people, for example "Candidates in this sequence applied through our careers page and agreed to automated, recorded phone screening." It is recorded with every call the sequence places.

Activate, pause and resume

Choose Activate to start sending. You cannot activate a sequence with no steps.

Pause stops every further send immediately. Nobody is removed — when you choose Resume, anyone whose next step already came due is sent it straight away, so pause and resume with that in mind.

There is no way to delete a sequence. Pause it and leave it.

Add people to a sequence

You can only add people to an Active sequence.

From the sequence itself — the Enroll prospects card. Search by name or email, tick the people you want and choose Enroll selected.

From the candidate list — select people with the checkboxes and choose Add to sequence… on the bulk bar.

From one person's page — choose Add to sequence….

From a pool — open the pool and choose Add pool to sequence… to add everyone in it.

From sourcing — tick Add to sequence on hand-off on the Source tab, and everyone you hand off goes straight into the sequence you picked. See Source candidates.

Automatically, at a pipeline stage — add an automation under Settings → Job settings → Automation with the action Add to sequence. See pipeline automations.

Every route opens the same dialog, Add to a sequence, where you pick the sequence. It carries one checkbox, Send even if we contacted them recently, which overrides the contact cooldown for this batch only.

Adding the same person twice does nothing — they keep their existing place in the sequence.

Who is refused

InsightHire refuses to add someone when:

• they are on the do-not-contact list;
• they have restricted processing under GDPR;
• the sequence has email steps and they have no email address;
• the sequence has text or phone steps and they have no phone number;
• they were contacted by another of your sequences inside the cooldown window — unless you say to send anyway.

Individual steps are also skipped rather than sent when they cannot run: a text step is skipped for anyone who has not opted in to text messages, and text and phone steps are skipped entirely if those features are not enabled for your organization. The rest of the sequence continues.

Read the results

The sequence page shows five numbers at the top: Enrolled, Active, Replied, Messages sent and Opened.

By step breaks the same thing down per step — Sent, Delivered, Failed and Opted out — so you can see which follow-up is doing the work and which one is burning goodwill. Under it is the count of people who replied on any channel since being added.

The Enrollments table lists everyone with their status and next send:

Open rates depend on tracking pixels and are always an undercount. Treat Replied as the real number.

What stops a sequence

• They reply — on any channel, as long as Stop automatically when the candidate replies is on.
• They text STOP — this also opts them out of text messages entirely. See Text candidates.
• You choose Stop on their row in the Enrollments table.
• They become do-not-contact or GDPR-restricted — caught before the next send.
• The steps run out — they are marked Completed.
• You pause the sequence — sending halts for everyone until you resume.

A step that fails to send does not stop the sequence. InsightHire retries it about an hour later and counts it under Failed.

Related

• Unified inbox — where the replies land.
• Text candidates — consent rules before you add a text step.
• Phone screens — what the candidate hears on a phone screen step.