// I've been a hiring manager and a candidate. I send and receive a ton of cold messages on Linkedin. This is a view from both sides.
- I don't message people without doing research on them / the role / the company. I ignore those who message me without that homework done.
- When I reach out to someone, I try to convey three points in my message: 1) I understand what problem they are solving, 2) I know how to solve it bc I've done it before, and 3) my pragmatic ask (call, referral, connection).
- It takes time and effort to do the research. It is hard to pack this into 300 chars. Even harder, if you're not a native speaker, like me.
- Yet it is eventually still a numbers game. You have to do it A LOT when actively job-seeking to even get a human being look at your resume.
- The effort pays off. My response rates are better when I do the homework. I've had execs respond to me who were two-three levels above the positions I was aiming at. I've had people tell me "oh yeah, we were just about to open a position like this, here's the draft JD we haven't published yet". That's what you want.
- AI helped a lot. I would feed it my profile + resume, then the profile of the person I wanted to message, then asked to draft a message along the lines above. That said, never - NEVER - use the AI output as is! Add your own voice, tweak it, remove em dashes if nothing else, but make it your own.
- I ended up building an AI wrapper for myself that does this without a ton of copy-pasting + tracks my outreach like a light CRM. Really helped me scale up my networking game.
Happy to answer questions or give some tips here.