7 ms·

Startup advice: cold recruiting

154 points by gdb 12y ago

petercooper 12y ago
Ultimately it boils down to "be human" or, failing that, "sound human" :-)
lgmspb 12y ago
Thanks for the post, really usefull. But what is the general response rate to this kind of emails, does anyone has any stats?
- gdb 12y ago
  I've gotten about a 80-90% response rate to the template I show in the post. With a more naive template, it was often more like 10-20%.
  - lgmspb 12y ago
    That is quite impressive
  - opendais 12y ago
    That is pretty impressive. I guess more people respond to cold email/calling than I would have thought. Personally, I always click spam on that kind of thing unless I've shown somewhere that I'm actively searching.
    - gdb 12y ago
      Guess you're one of the remaining 20-10% :).
      - opendais 12y ago
        Haha, you'd never send me one of those emails so we'll never know. <3
    - mason55 12y ago
      Remember that his emails are coming from Stripe. If you're recruiting for generic unknown startup expect your response rates to be lower.
      - opendais 12y ago
        I don't do recruiting and I don't work for a startup. ;) But this is true.
  - jaegerpicker 12y ago
    That's a pretty great template, I get at least 5 emails a week (usually a little more) and I try to reply to them just because you never know when the market could change and you need contacts to get a job. That said it's usually a week later that I reply that I'm not interested but thanks for thinking of me but an email like yours would get an immediate reply.
  - Swizec 12y ago
    To be honest, I'd be far more inclined to reply to an email from Stripe (a company I recognise/like) than most other cold mail. Also the advice about including a specific actionable time to make the next step is golden. Telling people exactly what you want converts best in most scenarios.
    - lgmspb 12y ago
      Yeah, that is true. I believe company name may play a HUGE role in the response rate.
  - beat 12y ago
    Thanks, gdb. I'm totally gonna plagiarize you when I need to send cold emails. :)
- objclxt 12y ago
  It's pretty high. I normally completely ignore generic recruiting e-mails that have made no effort to find out more about me. If someone's gone to the effort of looking into my work in detail I'll normally repay the kindness by replying. Case in point, a few months ago Udacity sent me an e-mail which went in some detail about a blog post I'd written, some of my Stack Overflow answers...it was pretty clear the person writing had actually taken the time to read some of my stuff, so even though I wasn't looking at the time I wrote back to thank them. As other people have pointed out, this also works the other way round. I actually 'reverse cold-recruited' an interview out of Stripe a year ago using the same methods, just applied from the perspective of the job hunter rather than the recruiter.
itafroma 12y ago
As someone on the receiving end of these emails, the point about demonstrating some knowledge of who I am or what I've done in the opening of the email is essential. It's almost guaranteed a reply, even if the opportunity doesn't seem immediately interesting. It's amazing how virtually none of the recruiting emails I've received do that.
- jonny_eh 12y ago
  Indeed. Anyone who even mentions an open-source project that I've created automatically gets a personal reply.
  - pkinsky 12y ago
    This is true. Even the recruiter who emailed me to tell me that an SBT skeleton project I cloned for convenience was 'very interesting' got a personal reply.
- mootothemax 12y ago
  Seconded. The number of emails i receive that make the least effort possible for something alleged to be so important is truly staggering. It can feel rather insulting. Is it really too much to ask for 15 minutes of your time if you genuinely find me so important?
  - wildpeaks 12y ago
    I suspect it's intentional: if they find someone that bites despite they put no effort into it, that means he will be easier to control and will work for cheaper without needing to spend as much on salary or good working environment; the same way spam doesn't work on most people, but when it finds a sucker, they bleed it dry.
- Silhouette 12y ago
  The inverse also applies: if I get recruiting mail from someone who demonstrates no special knowledge about me that a Google search or similar wouldn't instantly turn up, it tends to go in the circular file without a second thought. And never refuse to tell me how you found me in the rare event that I'm still interested enough to ask anyway, at least not if you expect any further interaction...
gwbas1c 12y ago
The best cold emails are ones with a tone that assumes that I'm a busy professional. The worst are the ones that present themselves as a golden, once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity.
pyb 12y ago
The technique also works for job-hunters writing to companies. Your cold emails should always mention something specific and personal about the recipient.
Zepplock 12y ago
Hello Greg, I would love to receive one of your "cold" emails ;)
- gdb 12y ago
  At this point it wouldn't be cold!
  - patio11 12y ago
    If I can circle this, star it, and shout it from the rooftops: if you meet someone at a meetup/conference/random coffeehouse or you Internet-meet them in HN comments or a blog discussion or whatever follow that up with an email. Even if you don't have anything to ask for, just say "Hey, it was great to meet you. We should keep in touch." Then actually keep in touch. Then, the next time you do need something, it isn't a bolt out of the blue when you show up in their inbox. (This is, naturally, reciprocal, and you should tell people that.) This is Every Sales Occupation Ever 101, but engineers seem to have a cultural block against doing it, as if sending an acquaintance "Hey, saw your startup just raised a round / you got a new job / you had a baby. Congratulations!" is anti-social behavior if there is ever the possibility that that relationship would result in money changing hands in the future.
    - danielweber 12y ago
      You make it sound easy. It probably is easy. But it still seems hard.
      - jonny_eh 12y ago
        It's hard in the same way asking a girl on a date is hard.
- netcan 12y ago
  Find and replace 'company' with 'person' and follow his cold email advice. As he just said, it's not cold at this point. But the advice still applies. Be concise, include proof-of-work & say the bare minimum required to get a face-to-face chat. :)
hglaser 12y ago
"As an experiment, we've decided to try out a startup advice column to share what we've learned along the way." This sounds really useful. I would love a way to subscribe to these advice posts (RSS, Twitter, email are all fine) without subscribing to the rest of the Stripe blog!
- gdb 12y ago
  Yep, I hear you. If this is successful, we'll likely break out a separate blog-alike for them.
nedwin 12y ago
Hackpad is a good starting point for tracking but if you really want to know how well you're converting, and automate a follow up email, I recommend you try out ToutApp.com. Super simple, super effective for this kind of thing.
edw519 12y ago
Hey gdb, I have made thousands of posts on Hacker News, Twitter, and my own blog. Every time someone emails me about one of my posts and tells me about how it affected them or reminded them of something, it makes my day. So thank you! I'm not interested in working for anyone I don't already know. But no worries, I'm an easy person to get to know and with all this great technology, you don't even have to meet me in real life. I don't have time for coffee, but I'd welcome the opportunity to talk about our common interests and build (another) new friendship on-line. Who knows where that can lead us. I encourage you to get to know me and others like me. I discourage you from using quick tips and tricks and showing others how to do the same. I embrace sincerity and reject !sincerity. Thanks for the insightful post. Looking forward to talking to you on-line again soon. - edw519
- gdb 12y ago
  Hey edw519, Thanks for the thoughtful reply! This certainly isn't intended to promote insincerity: the most important point is a proof-of-work. People tend to be pretty discerning, and can tell if you're just fishing for a throwaway comment because a blog post told you, or if you have something genuinely thoughtful to say. The purpose of these emails generally is pretty transparent, and it's certainly fine if people simply don't reply. I certainly agree with you that very often, "looking for a job" isn't a binary thing for people — they like getting to know other people in tech with a view to there being any of a number of ways to work together over time. These emails are often a good way to kick that off while being pretty upfront about your intent. - gdb :)
  - beat 12y ago
    This makes me think of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. It can almost be boiled down to two points: 1. People are more interested in themselves than anything else. 2. People can detect insincerity very easily. So the trick to "win friends and influence people" is, basically, be sincerely interested in other people.
Peroni 12y ago
Whilst entirely agree with Gregg's approach, I wouldn't use his response rates as a metric to measure your own response rates. Cold approaches like this tend to have significantly higher response rates when you are a company like Stripe. I would expect that most of the people they are approaching have heard of Stripe and are familiar with their high calibre team. If the same people are approached by a company/startup they have never heard of, the response rate will be very different. It's still a fantastic approach and arguably the best approach regardless of how well or little known your company is.
- lzecon 12y ago
  Totally agree. Reputation is the most important factor in response rates. Not to say this isn't a good approach to cold emails, but expecting anyone but the CEO of Stripe to get a 90% response rate using this template is kidding themselves. It's frustrating for recruiters because this is obviously something they have little control over, but pretty much the most important factor in their job success.
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
I think this is a pretty good approach to cold emails for a company like Stripe. If your company doesn't have the name recognition of a Stripe, however, the "if you're up for it, I'd love to grab coffee next week to chat" close in an introductory email is probably going to be a lot harder to pull off with most candidates because you almost certainly won't be able to establish that the value of the meeting might reasonably be higher than the cost of the recipient's time. This is why in-person networking is so important for most startups. To make the most of it, everybody in the organization should understand that networking is an opportunity (to meet potential customers, partners and employees) and they should be prepared to articulate a compelling description of what the company does. It's a gentle version of "always be closing." Unfortunately, you don't need to go to many events to discover that a lot of startup founders and employees aren't effective at communicating what their companies do and why the person they're talking to should be interested in learning more. And then they wonder why they have a hard time attracting talent.
Jemaclus 12y ago
> Always have the ping come from a non-recruiter. I got an email a few days ago from the CEO of a startup in SF. In the email, he followed all of the rules in this email, including trying to get face-to-face chat by offering to get coffee. I'm not really looking for a job but I am open to new opportunities, so I replied and agreed to get coffee. The response comes from a recruiter. What? The CEO sends me an email and then hands my response off to a recruiter? Or did the recruiter send the email on behalf of the CEO? I'm not even sure what's going on, but it's incredibly misleading. And then when I respond and politely decline to proceed further, the recruiter tries to set me up with a phone call with yet another person that isn't the original CEO. What part of this makes sense? What happened to the original, informal face-to-face chat? You totally blew it, dude. YOU contacted me, not the other way around. You have the burden of proof of attracting me to your company. You should be the one jumping through hoops, not me. Would you do this bait-and-switch to your biggest customer? If the answer is yes, you probably don't need to be CEO. And if not, then why would you treat a potential team member worse than you would treat your best customer? C'mon. Be smart about this recruiting thing.
- SilasX 12y ago
  Interesting! This may explain what happened to me recently. I got an recruitment email that looked to be from the CTO of a startup. From their site, it appeared to be a ~50-150-person operation, so not a case of "everyone does everything". I was planning to respond something like, "Whoa, you're the CTO and you're recruiting people yourself? That's pretty hardcore!" (Or something less goofy, I don't know.) I didn't, but based on your experience, it was probably some kind of trick like that.
  - Jemaclus 12y ago
    I generally don't respond to recruiters because they usually don't know what the hell they're talking about. They see the word "Javascript" on my LinkedIn profile and then pitch me Front-End Development positions (despite the fact that the last time I held that title was in 2008) and ignore the fact that my primary skills in the last 6 years have been back-end related. Frustrating. So I generally don't reply. This email from "the CEO" was well written and actually took into account my most recent activity. The combination of appearing that it came from the CEO and that they actually did some research suggested that they actually wanted me, and weren't just flooding everyone with recruitment letters. But then there was the whole bait-and-switch thing, so... I'm really frustrated right now.
janthoene 12y ago
Would be somewhat ironic if this template raises the bar on cold recruiting emails and at the same time suffers a decline in response rates, given that everyone around HN ends up using it.
jcurbo 12y ago
I was just on the receiving end of one of these, but it didn't quite work the same way. The email started out mentioning posts of mine on HN (met the first criteria, proof-of-work) and how their company was using that technology, which was effective and hooked me into reading the email and not immediately deleting it; but then went into a paragraph describing their company (didn't meet the second, describing what your company does). It did come from their CEO (so, met the third). Up to now, not too bad, although it was a little long and so starts to violate the guideline about length. The difference came at the end of the email, where instead of outreaching for me directly, the CEO was looking for my help in filling two engineering positions they have. It wasn't couched as "we're interested in you and possibly someone else if you know anyone," it was "I'm looking for your help in filling these positions." I had a slight negative reaction to this - why should I help you with your recruiting, when I'm not involved in what you're doing? (I should point out that I'm not really the target audience for the type of person they're looking for, either) I wish this company all the best, but I don't feel like I need to help with their recruiting. I haven't replied back to the guy and probably won't do anything else with it. (although he'll see this post, which I'm obviously ok with) The other wrinkle was (and this is really minor), in the 'proof-of-work' section, he mentioned seeing a post of mine about OCaml. This threw me for a minute, as I haven't written anything on HN specifically about OCaml and I'm not even an OCaml programmer or involved in that community. Closest I could find was a post I made about type theory, on a story about OCaml, where I said "well, this isn't OCaml, but..." It probably impacted my overall feeling about the cold email in a negative way. edit: I will say that I did get a cold email once from a Google recruiter, and he pretty much followed Stripe's guide. He got a positive response from me, including a good follow-up phone conversation. I wasn't willing to move to California though so that ended things pretty quickly, but I did appreciate the guy's effort.
- raving-richard 12y ago
  I would be replying to the first email you mention, with something along the lines of: "Sure, I'd love to help you! My rates are $x per hour, and I currently have $y hours free in the next week you can buy if you're still interested." Or something along those lines. Don't work for for-profit companies for free (and for not-for-profits, look at how much the top people are getting paid).
natural219 12y ago
This is excellently written, and honestly, goes way beyond recruiting. This sums up pretty much everything I've learned about sending emails, and I think applies uniformly across industries / types of work.
Ologn 12y ago
They say engineers receive a lot of these emails, but one of the main differentiators is unmentioned - they are coming from Stripe, not an outside recruiter. I get lots of headhunter emails, but only a few from recruiters working at the company. This is often preferable for a number of reasons. The proof of work is important. I get lots of automated emails from headhunters, for jobs or contracts which have nothing to do with my skillset, that are low paying three month contracts halfway across the US. It is fine if the email comes from a recruiter, as long as they're internal to the company.
EvanMiller 12y ago
I occasionally receive emails like these, and I agree with most of this advice. I will add a couple of personal turn-offs: * Overtesting. I have received multiple emails from different people at the same company with the exact same subject line ("Hey Evan, let's chat"). I am sure this subject works better than the other ones that they tried, but a little variation would make me feel like I am more than a conversion goal. * Being vague about the purpose of "chatting". If an engineer emails me and saying he or she "would love to hear more about X", where X is something I've done, it's not immediately apparent that they actually don't give a shit about X unless they can hire me. Don't be bashful, just say your company is hiring. At least when a recruiter (or founder) emails, I know what page we're on.
- gedrap 12y ago
  >>> Don't be bashful, just say your company is hiring. While I haven't received this (yet), I strongly agree. Everyone knows a guy who messages you after years of not being in touch, asking how are you doing and all that crap while we both know he doesn't care and it's just a foreplay before asking for some favour. I won't say yes just because of that, so let's stop wasting time and looking silly.
  - borski 12y ago
    You are possibly being overly cynical here. It is completely plausible that the person both cares (genuinely) about how you have been the past few years, AND is hiring and thinks you'd be a great fit. These are not mutually exclusive. Not all founders are completely self-serving.
lumens 12y ago
"Always have the ping come from a non-recruiter," is a great point, and key to pushing your response rates over the top. Before starting https://www.mightyspring.com https://www.mightyspring.com, which reduces the need for this tactical dance all together, I was a full-time technical recruiter. Often I found that if it was especially important to get ahold of a particular person, I could increase my chances by removing my email signature (which contained my title). Same logic, of course. Traditional recruiting (cold calls/emails) has jumped the shark. Signal-to-noise ratios are poor, causing prospective recruits to assume messages are spam/trash. It's not that these people aren't interested in new opportunities — they are! — but only opportunities that match their specific, mostly unspoken, criteria. As someone on the sending side of a cold email, you're generally not privy to this criteria. People should have a truly safe way to tell the world, "I want to hear about opportunities from Stripe", without risking their current job in any way. We make this possible at Mighty Spring and call it "Passive Job Search".
- rogerbinns 12y ago
  > ... but only opportunities that match their specific, mostly unspoken, criteria. As someone on the sending side of a cold email, you're generally not privy to this criteria You are thinking about the above average recruiters. My resume and linkedin have a clear "note to recruiters" at the top where I try to articulate the criteria and explain why. For example I say small companies/startups. Yet 95% of the recruiter emails I get show they haven't looked at the note at all. Fortunately having such a note makes it easy for me determine if the recruiter has done any work.
fecak 12y ago
From a job seeker approach, I'd think the 'opposite' of this is also effective (and what I'd suggest). Particularly the proof of work inclusion, which shows employers and hiring managers that you took some care in the contact. If someone emailed gdb and included much of this same information, I'd hope that they'd likely get an interview. Hey gdb, I just read your blog post about Open Source Retreat and love how Stripe is supporting the community. I'm a senior engineer with KNOWN COMPANY on the KNOWN PRODUCT team. Would you be interested in getting together for a cup of coffee to talk about what it's like to work for Stripe?
- raving-richard 12y ago
  I'm in the job market right now, but being in a country other than the one I'm looking for a job in, it means that I can't do what you suggest. But, this is something I really want to do. I wouldn't go in asking for a job, but just a "I want to know what you do and how you do it (and what sort of jobs exist at your place)". I suspect it's great for networking as well, if they do have a job come up, they might think of me...
  - fecak 12y ago
    The only part that you can't do is the cup of coffee. That doesn't mean you can't start a dialogue. Many people got their jobs through this kind of initial contact and some common interest, often in an open source project. The best approach, as you mention, probably doesn't include asking for a job right away. Build some interest first.
chris_vannoy 12y ago
Better yet, don't send cold recruiting email. Know who you're recruiting and build a relationship so they know who you are. It's a corollary to what patio11 said elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917255), but more than that, if you build a relationship ahead of time, all of the sudden you don't have to do all the bullshit interview stuff that comes later. You already know what the candidate's like. You already know their technical skill level. Then it just becomes about fit. No whiteboards, no brain teasers, no bullshit.
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silverbax88 12y ago
I love Stripe. Huge fan. But if I get an email from someone, anyone, at a company who wants to 'grab lunch' and talk about me working for company XYZ, I'll pass. I mean, he says this is what has been the most effective for them, so I can't argue that point. But the reality is I personally wouldn't ever take anyone up on this. Actually, now that I think about it, I would probably only respond if it was an email actually from the dev manager or exec who wanted to talk to me about working on his team.
- deleted 12y ago
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- gk1 12y ago
  Can you explain why?
- gdb 12y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! I'm not sure I fully follow your comment — what's the distinction you're drawing between managers/execs wanting to talk about their team, and someone wanting to talk about working at the company? Is it the specificity of them wanting you for their particular team?
  - silverbax88 12y ago
    Because who you specifically work for matters the most. And getting contacted by another dev just reeks of them being put up to it by the company. I don't want to work for a company that makes it's developers go out and have lunch as a headhunter. I know I wouldn't want to have to reach out to people I didn't know and 'have lunch' with them just to see if they would be good people to work with.
siliconc0w 12y ago
" (Unfortunately, this doesn't mean you should send people a crafted hash.)" New idea for a recruiting cryptocurrency - prove you're serious by hashing my profile a couple billion times.
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- temp_fbacc 12y ago
  Hello - Some feedback from someone in the market you're targeting - if I were to receive an email from you, the first thing I'd do is hit up the website - which is default bootstrap linking to a poorly edited PDF. I'd dismiss it based on that straight away based on your description here of being "launched".
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  - temp_nf 12y ago
    @temp_fbacc - Thanks for the feedback, I am not the best at creating PDF! I do point them to our main website, which I think is bit more informative and a better layout. if you could register so I can grab your email and get some more feedback, that would be appreciated. I would be happy to give you access so you can see what I have developed.
incision 12y ago
I'm inclined to be extremely mistrustful of messages like this. As best I can tell, the majority of contacts I've had along this pattern came from someone's clever 'growth hacker'. It makes sense, a more typical message is going straight to the trash while a feigned recruitment has a decent chance of getting me to visit your website. Though, I think my typical work makes me a big target for this - social proof is paramount in the public sector and listing a marquee agency as a customer is a key to the city.
- gdb 12y ago
  Wow. Really unfortunate that people end up doing that. I think the most important part about cold outreach of any sort is to be sincere (cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917277).
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
I feel like this post is generally on track, but it still falls into the same problem that come with all questions about recruiting: People trying to hire quality people quickly/easily. Arguably, hiring is the most important thing that you can do, with firing being a close runner up. This should be the thing that the CEO is most engaged with, especially if the CEO is doing his job as "culture minister." Now this doesn't mean that a CEO is the only person who talks to a new hire, but it does mean that the CEO should be the lead face that interacts with the possible hire from first contact. This also doesn't mean that the CEO is only doing recruiting. Ideally the recruiting team would offer to the CEO a top ten list of candidates for a position and then the CEO makes the decision to contact and woo the possible hire until he/she is confident that this person is a good fit and has the skills necessary. Nothing is more important than the people in your company, so treat them that way and you don't have to fuck around with A/B testing emails.
- gdb 12y ago
  You're right: there are no shortcuts in hiring. No matter what blog posts on the internet you read, hiring is hard work, and requires a great deal of attention and thought. The bullets I describe are mostly principles to focus your thinking if you're choosing to do cold outreach — it's generally better if you can just hire from within your network though.
nbarry 12y ago
> Don't explain what your company does. ... Google would never send someone an email saying "I work at Google, a search company in Mountain View which is organizing the world's information". The Google comparison is a poor one, since Google is extraordinarily well known, and most start-ups aren't. And even they do describe the team each position is on, at least on its job postings. If I were getting enough cold emails that I wanted to filter some of them out, I'd be likely to avoid emails that made me do work to research what a company does. A brief sentence about what they do, and why the recruiter/CEO/etc. thinks I'm a good match, would go a long way toward getting that coffee date.
- gdb 12y ago
  There's definitely a tradeoff there — the flip side is that after reading a bunch of company descriptions, they all start to blend together. So counterintuitively, a full description can cause your email to be ignored. In my mind, it's all about creating a (genuine!) connection with the person, and being cautious about consuming their time.
  - nbarry 12y ago
    Hmm, good point. Maybe there's a sweet spot there where you give enough detail to explain what your company does and what you're looking for from the person you're reaching out to, but don't go too long. Like, maybe 1-2 sentences max. "Our company is seeking to disrupt X industry through disintermediation, and I thought you looked like the badass engineer who could help us take our user interface to the next level."
thinkerer 12y ago
I dont know. I personally felt it was better to at least give the person an idea of my background and what I am up to. It solves the issue of finding someone whos vision is aligned to yours. A random note for coffee doesnt work that well for me tbh.
- gedrap 12y ago
  It doesn't say that it's over of conversation, we either meet right now or forget. Feel free to continue conversation online, it's just call to action, showing initiative. It's easier to respond to initiative, rather than initiate. And it's easier to convince someone to accept an offer face-to-face rather by messaging. We are social creatures after all.
bobbles 12y ago
I wonder if anyone has gone as far as to simply offer the person a consulting fee for coming and talking to them for an hour. eg. I know you're busy, but we'd be willing to pay you a consulting rate of x/hr to discuss how your experience may help us achieve what we are aiming for. Still going to be orders of magnitude cheaper than going through a recruiter, and potential recruits have something invested in making sure the meeting is worthwhile.
joshguthrie 12y ago
As a developer, I like the point where the recruiter is not trying to bait us with bullshit ("The Facebook of Uber for Porn"). Any mail containing a "our company does X" gets send to the trash.
aaronbrethorst 12y ago
The last two recruiting-related occurrences that have gotten past the Spam+Delete stage for me: * A Facebook recruiter does a copy-paste on an email to an unknown number of iOS developers (including me). This is rapidly determined on Twitter, and the poor person is summarily mocked. A fairly senior FB person reaches out to me personally, apologizes, and asks if I'd be interested in chatting with them. I say "sure," of course. Personal engagement is worth a lot. A recruiter who copy-pastes an email to me and hundreds or thousands of others is worth less than nothing to me. * An Apple recruiter reached out to me a couple months ago and asked if I'd be interested in an engineering position on their camera/photo team. I declined since I have absolutely no interest in relocating from Seattle to the South Bay, but he obviously had done some research on me to know that—were I to join any team at Apple—this would be my first choice. I was impressed, and replied to give my regrets that I have no interest in living down there. I get calls and Linkedin invites from recruiters several times per week. At this point, I just reject any phone call I get from unrecognized numbers, and delete any email I get from Linkedin. These people are obviously trying to play a numbers game, which will simply never work with me.
Akujin 12y ago
There's pretty much no chance I'm gonna go out of my way to meet you in my spare time for coffee when I don't even know the minimum salary for this potential position unless I'm actually actively looking for a job. If you're gonna be fishing for developers you need better bait than that.

154 points by gdb 12y ago

Ultimately it boils down to "be human" or, failing that, "sound human" :-)

Thanks for the post, really usefull. But what is the general response rate to this kind of emails, does anyone has any stats?

gdb 12y ago
I've gotten about a 80-90% response rate to the template I show in the post. With a more naive template, it was often more like 10-20%.
- lgmspb 12y ago
  That is quite impressive
- opendais 12y ago
  That is pretty impressive. I guess more people respond to cold email/calling than I would have thought. Personally, I always click spam on that kind of thing unless I've shown somewhere that I'm actively searching.
  - gdb 12y ago
    Guess you're one of the remaining 20-10% :).
    - opendais 12y ago
      Haha, you'd never send me one of those emails so we'll never know. <3
  - mason55 12y ago
    Remember that his emails are coming from Stripe. If you're recruiting for generic unknown startup expect your response rates to be lower.
    - opendais 12y ago
      I don't do recruiting and I don't work for a startup. ;) But this is true.
- jaegerpicker 12y ago
  That's a pretty great template, I get at least 5 emails a week (usually a little more) and I try to reply to them just because you never know when the market could change and you need contacts to get a job. That said it's usually a week later that I reply that I'm not interested but thanks for thinking of me but an email like yours would get an immediate reply.
- Swizec 12y ago
  To be honest, I'd be far more inclined to reply to an email from Stripe (a company I recognise/like) than most other cold mail. Also the advice about including a specific actionable time to make the next step is golden. Telling people exactly what you want converts best in most scenarios.
  - lgmspb 12y ago
    Yeah, that is true. I believe company name may play a HUGE role in the response rate.
- beat 12y ago
  Thanks, gdb. I'm totally gonna plagiarize you when I need to send cold emails. :)
objclxt 12y ago
It's pretty high. I normally completely ignore generic recruiting e-mails that have made no effort to find out more about me. If someone's gone to the effort of looking into my work in detail I'll normally repay the kindness by replying. Case in point, a few months ago Udacity sent me an e-mail which went in some detail about a blog post I'd written, some of my Stack Overflow answers...it was pretty clear the person writing had actually taken the time to read some of my stuff, so even though I wasn't looking at the time I wrote back to thank them. As other people have pointed out, this also works the other way round. I actually 'reverse cold-recruited' an interview out of Stripe a year ago using the same methods, just applied from the perspective of the job hunter rather than the recruiter.

itafroma 12y ago

As someone on the receiving end of these emails, the point about demonstrating some knowledge of who I am or what I've done in the opening of the email is essential. It's almost guaranteed a reply, even if the opportunity doesn't seem immediately interesting. It's amazing how virtually none of the recruiting emails I've received do that.

jonny_eh 12y ago
Indeed. Anyone who even mentions an open-source project that I've created automatically gets a personal reply.
- pkinsky 12y ago
  This is true. Even the recruiter who emailed me to tell me that an SBT skeleton project I cloned for convenience was 'very interesting' got a personal reply.
mootothemax 12y ago
Seconded. The number of emails i receive that make the least effort possible for something alleged to be so important is truly staggering. It can feel rather insulting. Is it really too much to ask for 15 minutes of your time if you genuinely find me so important?
- wildpeaks 12y ago
  I suspect it's intentional: if they find someone that bites despite they put no effort into it, that means he will be easier to control and will work for cheaper without needing to spend as much on salary or good working environment; the same way spam doesn't work on most people, but when it finds a sucker, they bleed it dry.
Silhouette 12y ago
The inverse also applies: if I get recruiting mail from someone who demonstrates no special knowledge about me that a Google search or similar wouldn't instantly turn up, it tends to go in the circular file without a second thought. And never refuse to tell me how you found me in the rare event that I'm still interested enough to ask anyway, at least not if you expect any further interaction...

gwbas1c 12y ago

The best cold emails are ones with a tone that assumes that I'm a busy professional. The worst are the ones that present themselves as a golden, once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity.

pyb 12y ago

The technique also works for job-hunters writing to companies. Your cold emails should always mention something specific and personal about the recipient.

Zepplock 12y ago

Hello Greg, I would love to receive one of your "cold" emails ;)

gdb 12y ago
At this point it wouldn't be cold!
- patio11 12y ago
  If I can circle this, star it, and shout it from the rooftops: if you meet someone at a meetup/conference/random coffeehouse or you Internet-meet them in HN comments or a blog discussion or whatever follow that up with an email. Even if you don't have anything to ask for, just say "Hey, it was great to meet you. We should keep in touch." Then actually keep in touch. Then, the next time you do need something, it isn't a bolt out of the blue when you show up in their inbox. (This is, naturally, reciprocal, and you should tell people that.) This is Every Sales Occupation Ever 101, but engineers seem to have a cultural block against doing it, as if sending an acquaintance "Hey, saw your startup just raised a round / you got a new job / you had a baby. Congratulations!" is anti-social behavior if there is ever the possibility that that relationship would result in money changing hands in the future.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    You make it sound easy. It probably is easy. But it still seems hard.
    - jonny_eh 12y ago
      It's hard in the same way asking a girl on a date is hard.
netcan 12y ago
Find and replace 'company' with 'person' and follow his cold email advice. As he just said, it's not cold at this point. But the advice still applies. Be concise, include proof-of-work & say the bare minimum required to get a face-to-face chat. :)

hglaser 12y ago

"As an experiment, we've decided to try out a startup advice column to share what we've learned along the way." This sounds really useful. I would love a way to subscribe to these advice posts (RSS, Twitter, email are all fine) without subscribing to the rest of the Stripe blog!

gdb 12y ago
Yep, I hear you. If this is successful, we'll likely break out a separate blog-alike for them.

nedwin 12y ago

Hackpad is a good starting point for tracking but if you really want to know how well you're converting, and automate a follow up email, I recommend you try out ToutApp.com. Super simple, super effective for this kind of thing.

edw519 12y ago

Hey gdb, I have made thousands of posts on Hacker News, Twitter, and my own blog. Every time someone emails me about one of my posts and tells me about how it affected them or reminded them of something, it makes my day. So thank you! I'm not interested in working for anyone I don't already know. But no worries, I'm an easy person to get to know and with all this great technology, you don't even have to meet me in real life. I don't have time for coffee, but I'd welcome the opportunity to talk about our common interests and build (another) new friendship on-line. Who knows where that can lead us. I encourage you to get to know me and others like me. I discourage you from using quick tips and tricks and showing others how to do the same. I embrace sincerity and reject !sincerity. Thanks for the insightful post. Looking forward to talking to you on-line again soon. - edw519

gdb 12y ago
Hey edw519, Thanks for the thoughtful reply! This certainly isn't intended to promote insincerity: the most important point is a proof-of-work. People tend to be pretty discerning, and can tell if you're just fishing for a throwaway comment because a blog post told you, or if you have something genuinely thoughtful to say. The purpose of these emails generally is pretty transparent, and it's certainly fine if people simply don't reply. I certainly agree with you that very often, "looking for a job" isn't a binary thing for people — they like getting to know other people in tech with a view to there being any of a number of ways to work together over time. These emails are often a good way to kick that off while being pretty upfront about your intent. - gdb :)
- beat 12y ago
  This makes me think of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. It can almost be boiled down to two points: 1. People are more interested in themselves than anything else. 2. People can detect insincerity very easily. So the trick to "win friends and influence people" is, basically, be sincerely interested in other people.

Peroni 12y ago

Whilst entirely agree with Gregg's approach, I wouldn't use his response rates as a metric to measure your own response rates. Cold approaches like this tend to have significantly higher response rates when you are a company like Stripe. I would expect that most of the people they are approaching have heard of Stripe and are familiar with their high calibre team. If the same people are approached by a company/startup they have never heard of, the response rate will be very different. It's still a fantastic approach and arguably the best approach regardless of how well or little known your company is.

lzecon 12y ago
Totally agree. Reputation is the most important factor in response rates. Not to say this isn't a good approach to cold emails, but expecting anyone but the CEO of Stripe to get a 90% response rate using this template is kidding themselves. It's frustrating for recruiters because this is obviously something they have little control over, but pretty much the most important factor in their job success.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

I think this is a pretty good approach to cold emails for a company like Stripe. If your company doesn't have the name recognition of a Stripe, however, the "if you're up for it, I'd love to grab coffee next week to chat" close in an introductory email is probably going to be a lot harder to pull off with most candidates because you almost certainly won't be able to establish that the value of the meeting might reasonably be higher than the cost of the recipient's time. This is why in-person networking is so important for most startups. To make the most of it, everybody in the organization should understand that networking is an opportunity (to meet potential customers, partners and employees) and they should be prepared to articulate a compelling description of what the company does. It's a gentle version of "always be closing." Unfortunately, you don't need to go to many events to discover that a lot of startup founders and employees aren't effective at communicating what their companies do and why the person they're talking to should be interested in learning more. And then they wonder why they have a hard time attracting talent.

Jemaclus 12y ago

> Always have the ping come from a non-recruiter. I got an email a few days ago from the CEO of a startup in SF. In the email, he followed all of the rules in this email, including trying to get face-to-face chat by offering to get coffee. I'm not really looking for a job but I am open to new opportunities, so I replied and agreed to get coffee. The response comes from a recruiter. What? The CEO sends me an email and then hands my response off to a recruiter? Or did the recruiter send the email on behalf of the CEO? I'm not even sure what's going on, but it's incredibly misleading. And then when I respond and politely decline to proceed further, the recruiter tries to set me up with a phone call with yet another person that isn't the original CEO. What part of this makes sense? What happened to the original, informal face-to-face chat? You totally blew it, dude. YOU contacted me, not the other way around. You have the burden of proof of attracting me to your company. You should be the one jumping through hoops, not me. Would you do this bait-and-switch to your biggest customer? If the answer is yes, you probably don't need to be CEO. And if not, then why would you treat a potential team member worse than you would treat your best customer? C'mon. Be smart about this recruiting thing.

SilasX 12y ago
Interesting! This may explain what happened to me recently. I got an recruitment email that looked to be from the CTO of a startup. From their site, it appeared to be a ~50-150-person operation, so not a case of "everyone does everything". I was planning to respond something like, "Whoa, you're the CTO and you're recruiting people yourself? That's pretty hardcore!" (Or something less goofy, I don't know.) I didn't, but based on your experience, it was probably some kind of trick like that.
- Jemaclus 12y ago
  I generally don't respond to recruiters because they usually don't know what the hell they're talking about. They see the word "Javascript" on my LinkedIn profile and then pitch me Front-End Development positions (despite the fact that the last time I held that title was in 2008) and ignore the fact that my primary skills in the last 6 years have been back-end related. Frustrating. So I generally don't reply. This email from "the CEO" was well written and actually took into account my most recent activity. The combination of appearing that it came from the CEO and that they actually did some research suggested that they actually wanted me, and weren't just flooding everyone with recruitment letters. But then there was the whole bait-and-switch thing, so... I'm really frustrated right now.

janthoene 12y ago

Would be somewhat ironic if this template raises the bar on cold recruiting emails and at the same time suffers a decline in response rates, given that everyone around HN ends up using it.

jcurbo 12y ago

I was just on the receiving end of one of these, but it didn't quite work the same way. The email started out mentioning posts of mine on HN (met the first criteria, proof-of-work) and how their company was using that technology, which was effective and hooked me into reading the email and not immediately deleting it; but then went into a paragraph describing their company (didn't meet the second, describing what your company does). It did come from their CEO (so, met the third). Up to now, not too bad, although it was a little long and so starts to violate the guideline about length. The difference came at the end of the email, where instead of outreaching for me directly, the CEO was looking for my help in filling two engineering positions they have. It wasn't couched as "we're interested in you and possibly someone else if you know anyone," it was "I'm looking for your help in filling these positions." I had a slight negative reaction to this - why should I help you with your recruiting, when I'm not involved in what you're doing? (I should point out that I'm not really the target audience for the type of person they're looking for, either) I wish this company all the best, but I don't feel like I need to help with their recruiting. I haven't replied back to the guy and probably won't do anything else with it. (although he'll see this post, which I'm obviously ok with) The other wrinkle was (and this is really minor), in the 'proof-of-work' section, he mentioned seeing a post of mine about OCaml. This threw me for a minute, as I haven't written anything on HN specifically about OCaml and I'm not even an OCaml programmer or involved in that community. Closest I could find was a post I made about type theory, on a story about OCaml, where I said "well, this isn't OCaml, but..." It probably impacted my overall feeling about the cold email in a negative way. edit: I will say that I did get a cold email once from a Google recruiter, and he pretty much followed Stripe's guide. He got a positive response from me, including a good follow-up phone conversation. I wasn't willing to move to California though so that ended things pretty quickly, but I did appreciate the guy's effort.

raving-richard 12y ago
I would be replying to the first email you mention, with something along the lines of: "Sure, I'd love to help you! My rates are $x per hour, and I currently have $y hours free in the next week you can buy if you're still interested." Or something along those lines. Don't work for for-profit companies for free (and for not-for-profits, look at how much the top people are getting paid).

natural219 12y ago

This is excellently written, and honestly, goes way beyond recruiting. This sums up pretty much everything I've learned about sending emails, and I think applies uniformly across industries / types of work.

Ologn 12y ago

They say engineers receive a lot of these emails, but one of the main differentiators is unmentioned - they are coming from Stripe, not an outside recruiter. I get lots of headhunter emails, but only a few from recruiters working at the company. This is often preferable for a number of reasons. The proof of work is important. I get lots of automated emails from headhunters, for jobs or contracts which have nothing to do with my skillset, that are low paying three month contracts halfway across the US. It is fine if the email comes from a recruiter, as long as they're internal to the company.

EvanMiller 12y ago

I occasionally receive emails like these, and I agree with most of this advice. I will add a couple of personal turn-offs: * Overtesting. I have received multiple emails from different people at the same company with the exact same subject line ("Hey Evan, let's chat"). I am sure this subject works better than the other ones that they tried, but a little variation would make me feel like I am more than a conversion goal. * Being vague about the purpose of "chatting". If an engineer emails me and saying he or she "would love to hear more about X", where X is something I've done, it's not immediately apparent that they actually don't give a shit about X unless they can hire me. Don't be bashful, just say your company is hiring. At least when a recruiter (or founder) emails, I know what page we're on.

gedrap 12y ago
>>> Don't be bashful, just say your company is hiring. While I haven't received this (yet), I strongly agree. Everyone knows a guy who messages you after years of not being in touch, asking how are you doing and all that crap while we both know he doesn't care and it's just a foreplay before asking for some favour. I won't say yes just because of that, so let's stop wasting time and looking silly.
- borski 12y ago
  You are possibly being overly cynical here. It is completely plausible that the person both cares (genuinely) about how you have been the past few years, AND is hiring and thinks you'd be a great fit. These are not mutually exclusive. Not all founders are completely self-serving.

lumens 12y ago

"Always have the ping come from a non-recruiter," is a great point, and key to pushing your response rates over the top. Before starting https://www.mightyspring.com https://www.mightyspring.com, which reduces the need for this tactical dance all together, I was a full-time technical recruiter. Often I found that if it was especially important to get ahold of a particular person, I could increase my chances by removing my email signature (which contained my title). Same logic, of course. Traditional recruiting (cold calls/emails) has jumped the shark. Signal-to-noise ratios are poor, causing prospective recruits to assume messages are spam/trash. It's not that these people aren't interested in new opportunities — they are! — but only opportunities that match their specific, mostly unspoken, criteria. As someone on the sending side of a cold email, you're generally not privy to this criteria. People should have a truly safe way to tell the world, "I want to hear about opportunities from Stripe", without risking their current job in any way. We make this possible at Mighty Spring and call it "Passive Job Search".

rogerbinns 12y ago
> ... but only opportunities that match their specific, mostly unspoken, criteria. As someone on the sending side of a cold email, you're generally not privy to this criteria You are thinking about the above average recruiters. My resume and linkedin have a clear "note to recruiters" at the top where I try to articulate the criteria and explain why. For example I say small companies/startups. Yet 95% of the recruiter emails I get show they haven't looked at the note at all. Fortunately having such a note makes it easy for me determine if the recruiter has done any work.

fecak 12y ago

From a job seeker approach, I'd think the 'opposite' of this is also effective (and what I'd suggest). Particularly the proof of work inclusion, which shows employers and hiring managers that you took some care in the contact. If someone emailed gdb and included much of this same information, I'd hope that they'd likely get an interview. Hey gdb, I just read your blog post about Open Source Retreat and love how Stripe is supporting the community. I'm a senior engineer with KNOWN COMPANY on the KNOWN PRODUCT team. Would you be interested in getting together for a cup of coffee to talk about what it's like to work for Stripe?

raving-richard 12y ago
I'm in the job market right now, but being in a country other than the one I'm looking for a job in, it means that I can't do what you suggest. But, this is something I really want to do. I wouldn't go in asking for a job, but just a "I want to know what you do and how you do it (and what sort of jobs exist at your place)". I suspect it's great for networking as well, if they do have a job come up, they might think of me...
- fecak 12y ago
  The only part that you can't do is the cup of coffee. That doesn't mean you can't start a dialogue. Many people got their jobs through this kind of initial contact and some common interest, often in an open source project. The best approach, as you mention, probably doesn't include asking for a job right away. Build some interest first.

chris_vannoy 12y ago

Better yet, don't send cold recruiting email. Know who you're recruiting and build a relationship so they know who you are. It's a corollary to what patio11 said elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917255), but more than that, if you build a relationship ahead of time, all of the sudden you don't have to do all the bullshit interview stuff that comes later. You already know what the candidate's like. You already know their technical skill level. Then it just becomes about fit. No whiteboards, no brain teasers, no bullshit.

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silverbax88 12y ago

I love Stripe. Huge fan. But if I get an email from someone, anyone, at a company who wants to 'grab lunch' and talk about me working for company XYZ, I'll pass. I mean, he says this is what has been the most effective for them, so I can't argue that point. But the reality is I personally wouldn't ever take anyone up on this. Actually, now that I think about it, I would probably only respond if it was an email actually from the dev manager or exec who wanted to talk to me about working on his team.

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gk1 12y ago
Can you explain why?
gdb 12y ago
Thanks for the kind words! I'm not sure I fully follow your comment — what's the distinction you're drawing between managers/execs wanting to talk about their team, and someone wanting to talk about working at the company? Is it the specificity of them wanting you for their particular team?
- silverbax88 12y ago
  Because who you specifically work for matters the most. And getting contacted by another dev just reeks of them being put up to it by the company. I don't want to work for a company that makes it's developers go out and have lunch as a headhunter. I know I wouldn't want to have to reach out to people I didn't know and 'have lunch' with them just to see if they would be good people to work with.

siliconc0w 12y ago

" (Unfortunately, this doesn't mean you should send people a crafted hash.)" New idea for a recruiting cryptocurrency - prove you're serious by hashing my profile a couple billion times.

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temp_fbacc 12y ago
Hello - Some feedback from someone in the market you're targeting - if I were to receive an email from you, the first thing I'd do is hit up the website - which is default bootstrap linking to a poorly edited PDF. I'd dismiss it based on that straight away based on your description here of being "launched".
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- temp_nf 12y ago
  @temp_fbacc - Thanks for the feedback, I am not the best at creating PDF! I do point them to our main website, which I think is bit more informative and a better layout. if you could register so I can grab your email and get some more feedback, that would be appreciated. I would be happy to give you access so you can see what I have developed.

incision 12y ago

I'm inclined to be extremely mistrustful of messages like this. As best I can tell, the majority of contacts I've had along this pattern came from someone's clever 'growth hacker'. It makes sense, a more typical message is going straight to the trash while a feigned recruitment has a decent chance of getting me to visit your website. Though, I think my typical work makes me a big target for this - social proof is paramount in the public sector and listing a marquee agency as a customer is a key to the city.

gdb 12y ago
Wow. Really unfortunate that people end up doing that. I think the most important part about cold outreach of any sort is to be sincere (cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917277).

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

I feel like this post is generally on track, but it still falls into the same problem that come with all questions about recruiting: People trying to hire quality people quickly/easily. Arguably, hiring is the most important thing that you can do, with firing being a close runner up. This should be the thing that the CEO is most engaged with, especially if the CEO is doing his job as "culture minister." Now this doesn't mean that a CEO is the only person who talks to a new hire, but it does mean that the CEO should be the lead face that interacts with the possible hire from first contact. This also doesn't mean that the CEO is only doing recruiting. Ideally the recruiting team would offer to the CEO a top ten list of candidates for a position and then the CEO makes the decision to contact and woo the possible hire until he/she is confident that this person is a good fit and has the skills necessary. Nothing is more important than the people in your company, so treat them that way and you don't have to fuck around with A/B testing emails.

gdb 12y ago
You're right: there are no shortcuts in hiring. No matter what blog posts on the internet you read, hiring is hard work, and requires a great deal of attention and thought. The bullets I describe are mostly principles to focus your thinking if you're choosing to do cold outreach — it's generally better if you can just hire from within your network though.

nbarry 12y ago

> Don't explain what your company does. ... Google would never send someone an email saying "I work at Google, a search company in Mountain View which is organizing the world's information". The Google comparison is a poor one, since Google is extraordinarily well known, and most start-ups aren't. And even they do describe the team each position is on, at least on its job postings. If I were getting enough cold emails that I wanted to filter some of them out, I'd be likely to avoid emails that made me do work to research what a company does. A brief sentence about what they do, and why the recruiter/CEO/etc. thinks I'm a good match, would go a long way toward getting that coffee date.

gdb 12y ago
There's definitely a tradeoff there — the flip side is that after reading a bunch of company descriptions, they all start to blend together. So counterintuitively, a full description can cause your email to be ignored. In my mind, it's all about creating a (genuine!) connection with the person, and being cautious about consuming their time.
- nbarry 12y ago
  Hmm, good point. Maybe there's a sweet spot there where you give enough detail to explain what your company does and what you're looking for from the person you're reaching out to, but don't go too long. Like, maybe 1-2 sentences max. "Our company is seeking to disrupt X industry through disintermediation, and I thought you looked like the badass engineer who could help us take our user interface to the next level."

thinkerer 12y ago

I dont know. I personally felt it was better to at least give the person an idea of my background and what I am up to. It solves the issue of finding someone whos vision is aligned to yours. A random note for coffee doesnt work that well for me tbh.

gedrap 12y ago
It doesn't say that it's over of conversation, we either meet right now or forget. Feel free to continue conversation online, it's just call to action, showing initiative. It's easier to respond to initiative, rather than initiate. And it's easier to convince someone to accept an offer face-to-face rather by messaging. We are social creatures after all.

bobbles 12y ago

I wonder if anyone has gone as far as to simply offer the person a consulting fee for coming and talking to them for an hour. eg. I know you're busy, but we'd be willing to pay you a consulting rate of x/hr to discuss how your experience may help us achieve what we are aiming for. Still going to be orders of magnitude cheaper than going through a recruiter, and potential recruits have something invested in making sure the meeting is worthwhile.

joshguthrie 12y ago

As a developer, I like the point where the recruiter is not trying to bait us with bullshit ("The Facebook of Uber for Porn"). Any mail containing a "our company does X" gets send to the trash.

aaronbrethorst 12y ago

The last two recruiting-related occurrences that have gotten past the Spam+Delete stage for me: * A Facebook recruiter does a copy-paste on an email to an unknown number of iOS developers (including me). This is rapidly determined on Twitter, and the poor person is summarily mocked. A fairly senior FB person reaches out to me personally, apologizes, and asks if I'd be interested in chatting with them. I say "sure," of course. Personal engagement is worth a lot. A recruiter who copy-pastes an email to me and hundreds or thousands of others is worth less than nothing to me. * An Apple recruiter reached out to me a couple months ago and asked if I'd be interested in an engineering position on their camera/photo team. I declined since I have absolutely no interest in relocating from Seattle to the South Bay, but he obviously had done some research on me to know that—were I to join any team at Apple—this would be my first choice. I was impressed, and replied to give my regrets that I have no interest in living down there. I get calls and Linkedin invites from recruiters several times per week. At this point, I just reject any phone call I get from unrecognized numbers, and delete any email I get from Linkedin. These people are obviously trying to play a numbers game, which will simply never work with me.

Akujin 12y ago

There's pretty much no chance I'm gonna go out of my way to meet you in my spare time for coffee when I don't even know the minimum salary for this potential position unless I'm actually actively looking for a job. If you're gonna be fishing for developers you need better bait than that.