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As someone who does hiring, I want to see a brief, personal, informal email. If it feels like you’ve copied and pasted some mess of tech buzzwords and addresse

As someone who does hiring, I want to see a brief, personal, informal email. If it feels like you’ve copied and pasted some mess of tech buzzwords and addressed it to “dear hiring manager” (I get this a lot), then it’s going straight in the bin. Ideally, I’d like to see: Hi <my actual first name>, I’m a junior developer trying to break into the industry. I studied x at y, and I’m super interested in <some specific technical thing>. I’m hard-working and I love to learn. Are you available for a chat about this? Regards, <your name>

notreallyserio 5y ago
As long as you promise to send out brief, personal emails to all candidates that introduce themselves this way but are not selected for an interview, I fully support this.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  I'm not sure who I could make this promise to, but I do indeed personally respond to every person who writes me a personal email.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Promise was probably the wrong term but cool. I see this sort of ask in a lot of places coming from folks who are treating applicants being beneath them, and I guess it triggers me a bit.
_odey 5y ago
So how does one find your email? I'm asking this to showcase a problem I'm having right now while job searching (not at the junior level). Basically I'm trying to get in touch with companies directly, in the UK, and not through external recruiters, but I just can't seem to find an email of someone that does hiring. I go to LikedIn and search for the company, there is no contact email there, I browse through the people list, everybody there has InMail disabled so I can't message them (unless I pay for a recruiter account). Then I visit their website, they have only a generic contact@ or hello@ email there, if any. With that I message them and they disregard what I wrote and tell me to apply for the already open positions through their 3rd party apps (lever, greenhouse etc). Basically if I wanted to ask a few questions before formally applying I'd have no way of doing it. From the 40+ companies I tried to approach this way I have found only 3 people on LikedIn with InMail disabled that replied back, two "careers@" emails that even bothered to reply and exactly 0 emails of a person (hiring manager or equivalent) anywhere... This comes from someone at the senior level, who's not affraid of "cold emailing" around and insisting until I get a human on the other side of the chat. My point is, if you want peole to mesaage you please make sure they have a way to do it, and actually reply.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  To find people's work email addresses, you can try: hunter.io GitHub commit histories (although I think this might be against the TOS) It's also worth teaching out to folks in your network to ask for intros to specific companies. An intro to a non-hiring-manager at a company can be more fruitful than a cold email to a hiring manager.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  I include my email address along with the job postings I write[0]. Given that my name is in the email address, it's that much more egregious when I'm not addressed by name in an introductory email. I recognise that hiring works differently for everyone, and unfortunately the process is painful in many (probably most) instances. That's not something I can change, but I can at least try to make it work sensibly for my own company. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28722397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28722397

notreallyserio 5y ago

As long as you promise to send out brief, personal emails to all candidates that introduce themselves this way but are not selected for an interview, I fully support this.

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
I'm not sure who I could make this promise to, but I do indeed personally respond to every person who writes me a personal email.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Promise was probably the wrong term but cool. I see this sort of ask in a lot of places coming from folks who are treating applicants being beneath them, and I guess it triggers me a bit.

_odey 5y ago

So how does one find your email? I'm asking this to showcase a problem I'm having right now while job searching (not at the junior level). Basically I'm trying to get in touch with companies directly, in the UK, and not through external recruiters, but I just can't seem to find an email of someone that does hiring. I go to LikedIn and search for the company, there is no contact email there, I browse through the people list, everybody there has InMail disabled so I can't message them (unless I pay for a recruiter account). Then I visit their website, they have only a generic contact@ or hello@ email there, if any. With that I message them and they disregard what I wrote and tell me to apply for the already open positions through their 3rd party apps (lever, greenhouse etc). Basically if I wanted to ask a few questions before formally applying I'd have no way of doing it. From the 40+ companies I tried to approach this way I have found only 3 people on LikedIn with InMail disabled that replied back, two "careers@" emails that even bothered to reply and exactly 0 emails of a person (hiring manager or equivalent) anywhere... This comes from someone at the senior level, who's not affraid of "cold emailing" around and insisting until I get a human on the other side of the chat. My point is, if you want peole to mesaage you please make sure they have a way to do it, and actually reply.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
To find people's work email addresses, you can try: hunter.io GitHub commit histories (although I think this might be against the TOS) It's also worth teaching out to folks in your network to ask for intros to specific companies. An intro to a non-hiring-manager at a company can be more fruitful than a cold email to a hiring manager.
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
I include my email address along with the job postings I write[0]. Given that my name is in the email address, it's that much more egregious when I'm not addressed by name in an introductory email. I recognise that hiring works differently for everyone, and unfortunately the process is painful in many (probably most) instances. That's not something I can change, but I can at least try to make it work sensibly for my own company. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28722397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28722397