The Art of Cold Outreach
On behalf of recruiters worldwide — I’m sorry.
I’m sorry for all the spam, the generic flattery, creepy attempts to get personal with information you didn’t even know existed on the internet, and typos…why so many typos?
It’s no secret that recruiting emails have become a source of humor and scrutiny among engineers and teams worldwide. We’ve earned (rightfully so) a really bad rap.
We can do better. I believe in us.
Fortunately for us, we have good intentions. Our mission is to build great companies and admirable teams (if this is not what drives you, please consider another profession). The way we do it is through building relationships with talented people, seizing opportunities to share our company story, and providing a phenomenal experience along the way.
Whether you’re a recruiter, hiring manager or main source of referrals for your company (thank you), remember that you are entrusted with the company’s story, brand and reputation. Let this guide your tactics and approaches so you can represent with pride.
The following is a list of sourcing best practices and sample emails — after many requests for my own insights I figured this was as good a time as any to write down what I’ve learned along the way.
This list can also serve as a broader checklist for how you strategically approach cold outreach. At the end of the day, I believe, great recruiting and sourcing starts and ends with relationships. Cold outreach only gets you so far — and a lot farther if you stick to these best practices.
Let’s start with never, ever, please for the love of…DO NOT:
- Send a template.
- Send an email to someone you know NOTHING about.
- Send a template or spammy email to someone you know
- Make it more offensive by cutting & pasting a template and accidentally not filling it in, calling someone by a different name, or referring to a different company. In Gmail, CTRL-SHIFT-V to paste without formatting, if you must paste.
- Misspell words or make blatant grammatical errors
- Mention anything related to coding rockstars, ninjas, super-heroes, high-caliber talent…are you cringing yet?
- Ask them how their cat is doing or about their recent vacation to Puerto Rico that you discovered on Instagram… STALKER.
- Ask people to apply or send in their resume/CV
- Ask people to send your email to their friends and colleagues — they don’t even know you!
- Copy/paste the job description or requirements into the email
- Share memes or videos…the person on the other end is not your best friend or your colleague (yet)
- Make it fake personal with “how are you?” or “hope you had a great weekend, what did you do?”
- Turn it into a blog post or novel
- Keep sending emails every few days or every week— every month, six months, or yearly is more than enough.
The Glorious Go Forth and DO!
- Make the case to yourself — why I’m I reaching out to this person? Why do they look interesting? Make a note of this so you can share it with the prospect.
- Always, always, always give it a personal touch
- Be thoughtful and research the person you’re reaching out to. Do a light google search — Twitter, LinkedIn, Github, and personal websites should be default. This also helps you learn more about whether the person would be a great fit culturally for your team. If you have a team of tinkerers or open source advocates and the prospect has no evidence of open source contributions or side projects they might not be worth reaching out to.
- Reach out to referrals and leads first! They are the BEST method of recruiting — hands down! Take advantage of your team’s social networks!
- Check for connections before sending a cold mail — have the connection reach out or state the connection clearly in your email
- Clearly refer to something that relates to their background, work or interests
- Make sure your messaging is 100% true to the role and what you’re building. Also, make sure this isn’t dry or boring. Inspire the reader!
- Embed links so the recipient can easily learn more about the company, team, and product, if they so choose.
- Invite prospective candidates to coffee or to meet with the CTO, Founder, or Hiring Manager FIRST. Most people are down for this type of interaction as it builds community and fosters information sharing across the industry
- Keep it personal, business casual, short & sweet
- Share a bite size clip of the company story or vision, but leave something to the imagination (not in a creepy way please)
- Presume the best about their current role. “I know you probably wouldn’t consider leaving CompanyX” can build empathy/personal touch.
Lastly, read your email before you click ‘Send’! Even better, ask your colleague to read it. Are you proud of this email? Does it represent your company and team? Does it come off spammy or creepy? Are there grammatical errors or typos? Ask yourself and others, would you respond to this? If not, use that delete button and start over.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Do you have other tips or best practices? Please share!
Sample Emails For Inspiration
Hi Lil’ Mama,
I read about your contribution to the recent launch of RustyPipes Beta 1.0, and I was super impressed. While I’m sure you’re quite happy at CircleX, I wanted to reach out to introduce you to CompanyX, our vision, and the amazing team we’ve assembled <embed links>. Any chance you’re open to exploring new opportunities? Would you be up for grabbing coffee or having a quick chat this week?
Ke$ha
P.S. Hope you don’t mind my brevity, I know I have about 10 seconds for you to read this!
Hi Drake,
I saw that you are one of the main contributors to GeoTeaPot and I wanted to reach out. I work at CompanyX and we’re currently building out our ETL pipelines. We were thinking about using GeoTeaPot and wanted to see if you’d be up for grabbing coffee with our CTO this week — we’d love to swap some knowledge. Let me know what works best for you.
Thanks in advance!
P-Diddy
Hi MA$E,
I head up platform engineering at CompanyX — a NYC based startup.
Your github profile found your way to me via our amazing recruiting team and your work sounded right up our alley. Any chance you’d like to connect and chat a little more? We’re very low pressure, so no worries either way. If it’s not interesting or the right time, at the very least, I love meeting other people in the NYC tech scene.
We’re also having a little happy hour on our rooftop this Thursday evening (Eastside of the LBC). It’s our attempt to bring interesting folks in tech together, so if you’re interested I’ll forward the details.
Cheers!
Warren G
Hi Beyonce,
By way of introduction, my name is Missy Elliott and I head up Talent over here at Company X. We’re a team of 30 creating supa dupa fly technologies and we were also voted the best place to work it in NYC!
We’re looking for a senior iOS engineer to join our team and your background looks like a perfect fit — based on your contributions to ReactiveCocoa and a few of your presentations on iOS developer tooling (we’re big fans).
Any chance I sparked some curiosity? If not, do you know of folks senior like you who might be open to new opportunities — specifically fellow women in engineering? We’re trying our best to build a diverse team from the very beginning…and it’s no small task.
Cheers,
Missy Elliott
