Yes reaching out to your network is good, putting yourself out there through direct contact where possible is good (early in my career two jobs which were real stepping stones came from emailing a head of and ceo directly after a conference), spending time trying to find your edge relatively to others is good. But there are so many points in the whole process where it's simply luck of the draw that spray and pray within reason isn't a completely ridiculous route. Unless you're already in a role, try what you have to. It's no fun in it but things are always easier once you don't have anything to fall back too.
Right now we're in a weird place - if you have a network, you're pretty well off. If your network isn't hiring, or you are early in your career, it's brutal trying to get through the noise.
The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now. It takes being creative. I get a few emails a month right now. Honestly, I think this isn't going to work at this point - some go to my personal and some go to my professional emails. But what might work?
Look at people who are writing blogs. Is there something interesting on their blog? Is that worth engaging them on first? (I mean, don't waste their time if you aren't interested or if you're going to submarine it the second or third email - someone will feel used - but showing a dual purpose of the email might not be the worst thing and even if they don't have a position or influence on the position, you might have a good conversation.
Are you involved on bluesky/twitter/threads? Are you getting positive engagement? Are you finding ways to make community? It may not get the formal referral but it might make the social referral and give you 30 extra seconds with the resume and a reason to say yes.
P.S. I'm CEO of a Series A company. I get a lot of email from prospective candidates. I never hold it against them, and as long as it doesn't look like spam, I reply. Telling people not to send emails (I saw a bunch of that in the comments) is categorically bad advice.
Cold emailing definitely wont hurt your chances at the job.
But to be effective, the outreach needs to be heavily tailored and personalized. You need to make it obvious you aren’t copy and pasting the email to 20 other people.
When the people you're interviewing with are 'already senior' (e.g. direct reports to the CEO), you can sometimes make your case worse rather than better, because it feels like you're going over their head.
So rather than size...
- If the interviewer(s) in question feel like you're trying to circumvent them, you're probably making your case worse.
- The kind of CEO that tends to meddle in things below their level might drag down your case even if they like you, because folks can develop a distaste for their meddling.
- Doing this for senior roles, or roles at small companies can actually be worse, because the person in question is more likely to be close in reporting chain to the CEO, who is more likely to directly meddle in your hiring process. Zero- or one-level removed can be the worst.
Do that.
>Get in contact with current employees at the company. It is important that you send more than one email.
Don't do that.
>I've gotten dozens of emails asking for meetings and referrals.
I've never gotten one in my entire career, and I was hiring manager in multiple companies/roles.
>If the company is <30 people, reach out to the CEO directly.
Don't never ever EVER do that.
Edit: formatting
So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped because a contract recruiter or internal recruiter is going through resumes at 6 a minute and looking for keywords nowhere near the job profile? What's your trick to get through the noise? Right now, it's brutal from junior to staff, and if your network isn't hiring there's no real way to tell the difference between someone who is taking care and someone spamming 200 applications and using 5 minutes of AI to customize. So other than "utilize the network you built over 25 years," what's your advice if all you have is "don't do that?"
I'm glad I have a job now. However, it's brutal for people on the hunt in bad situations or people who have been laid off.
Ideally write the hiring manager and not HR. And, write something that makes it hard to not want to talk to you.
1: Minimal hygiene is writing something that shows you read the vacancy (if any). Don't: "I'm interested in the role, CV attached". do: "You want onsite in Amsterdam, I'm living in Milan but already planning to move to Amsterdam for reason X".
2: Stand out from the average applicant. Someone recently applied with a personal website that was a kinda-functioning OS (with some apps). Someone else applied with a YouTube channel hacking an ESP32 into their coffee machine. Someone applied with a tool on their GitHub profile, super well written, in our target language, doing interesting things on the database we're working with, etc., etc. how could I _not_ talk these applicants? All of these are soft signals that show affinity for their work as engineers. Don't: generic application letter combined with 3+ pages resume with too much detail.
3: if invited: get curious (but not overly opinionated/combative) about their stack. Candidates we've been most excited about have come in asking questions on how we're setup, and why we've made certain choices. Don't: expect the interviewer to ask all the questions, or bring only a prepared question that misses the mark.
4: Its a people process, if that's your challenge, work on that. Maybe you share a hobby with the interviewer, maybe you've both solved similar problems in earlier jobs, maybe you both like Haskell, maybe something else to connect over. Connection matters to most hiring managers.
Here's a small piece of advice from a dev involved in the hiring process. If your skills aren't a good (or even remote) fit you'll get binned. This might sound obvious but based on the amount of scatter-gun applications I've seen I'm not convinced.
I do maintain though that cold reach out is more often harmful due to the barrier of HR/recruiting built to prevent this from happening, and you trying to go around that will likely cause trouble.
Also, when you reach out to the employees for "the referral", what does this even mean? If the person knows you, worked with you, or went to college with you, then they can refer you, but if they haven't even met you and don't even know if you're real, what are you asking them to do? "Hey boss I got this email from this guy he says he's a good fit for this role we have open, do you wanna hire him?", is that it?
DO research the company. DO research the role, the team, the manager, the environment, the toolsets, the issues they're facing. Do NOT flood people's inboxes asking for "referrals" whatever that means.
> Don't never ever EVER do that.
Why not? Is the world really going to implode because someone wants a job so badly that they slip a message into some random CEO’s inbox, an inbox that’s probably already flooded with irrelevant emails from strangers asking irrelevant things?
Don’t ever convince yourself that someone is so important you can’t email them. That’s a self-defeating mindset. Send the email and let them decide whether to ignore it, mark it as spam, block you, or whatever. Life goes on, and there are far more important things to worry about.
We’ve had candidates spam our every Senior+ level staff at my current job (many not even in the relevant department) trying to get their resume boosted.
Those went from candidate to rejects very quickly.
Imagine as a ceo you receive emails from juniors wanting to work for your company. You might not even know the role, why would you waste time checking these Cv/email that detracts you from your goals? Usually are low quality and spammy , any ceo will quickly learn to ignore or forward to hr to blacklist these people. These are the same people that once they get a job will email the ceo for a raise.
As a ceo you hire hr to deal with that noise and only give you the top 3 are hr and others wasted their time filtering. If ceo does the filtering is useless.
Imagine for a tech role: the good devs would never email the CEO, the crap and entitles one will do. It’s definitively the kind of candidates you want to avoid.
At any rate, the downside of this is as follows.
The goal of having Human Resources, talent acquisition, recruiters, and other similar roles is to let hiring managers (and everyone above them, up and including the CEO) concentrate on doing their job and only assist the aforementioned roles in hiring. Of course hiring manager is ultimately responsible for hiring a good candidate but they are not expected to do things like posting job descriptions, initial screening, background checks, referral checks, employment history verification, dealing with legal stuff like NDAs etc etc, that's the job of HR/recruiters. Candidates reaching out to hiring managers (and especially higher ups) are not treated nicely by the HR as these candidates are attempting to take HR out of the picture.
HR are people and want to keep their job and get paid, and you circumventing them might be perceived as a threat to that.
That IN ADDITION to a disruption you will be causing hiring manager (or especially CEO) cause now they need to decide what to do with your email. Even though they have HR/recruiters to handle these things.
A typical result of such a "reach out" will likely be forwarding this email to HR and subsequent rejecting/blacklisting the candidate.
Edit: some clarifications
Now if you use AI to automate the personalization and start blasting it out indiscriminately, then yea, please don’t.
But if you are being genuine and hand writing emails expressing why you want to work for someone, it’s hard to screw it up.
Heck my CEO asks me all the time that people are messaging him and if i think they are interesting enough to hire.
If the company has a person/group dedicated to hiring then going around them is counterproductive. IMHO of course!
It's unclear if anyone cares.
Connecting the employer with employed to be is not the core proposition.
Seems like good advice.
Early career when I realized trying the 1000th way to make myself seem better than all the other college graduates with the same qualifications I gave up targetting and just sprayed and prayed and got jobs that way through pure lottery luck of ending up randomly on the pile at a moment when the company was too exhausted because they lost their preferred candidate at the last minute or something like that. I basically put in so many apps that the 1 in 1 million chance happened that I was an unremarkable cog that showed up at the right place at the right time.
By mid career when I actually had something worth anything to anyone then spray and pray was no longer necessary and targetting an application could actually be effective.
Please, no. Go through the proper channels like everyone else. If you have a referral - great. Otherwise, DON'T spam current employees you randomly find on linkedin or whatever. I get those from time to time and ignore 100% of them.
Much like many other decisions you're making in the job market, it's a polarizing choice that increases your overall chances when the alienated class of people isn't too large. If 90% of people ignore those emails but your chance of getting a first-round interview goes up 5x compared to a cold application when the remaining 10% respond, 2+ emails are easier to send than 1 application, especially when you've done the legwork to make your application any good.
I haven't used techniques like these specifically yet, but as somebody who nearly always eventually gets the job once I've had a first-round interview, I wouldn't be opposed to seeking out the hiring manager and contacting them directly to decrease the resumé false rejection rate.
There are more effective ways of spending your time than that.
Having been in the software industry for 30 years I feel the need to provide some balance and context to your advice. YMMV
Getting a startup to even survival level money takes incredible effort, skill, and time.
Outside of those, luck is by far the most important aspect. Which is out of your control.
You have to fight and beat dozens of biases and fallacies. Here is a small sample…
Survivorship bias — focusing on visible winners, ignoring the many failures Outcome bias — judging decisions by results rather than decision quality Availability bias — overweighting memorable success stories Publication bias — only successes get written about or promoted Narrative fallacy — inventing clean stories after the fact
Please ignore the one-shot-bro-influencers who have a fool proof recipe for making 10MMR with Ralph mode. If they are real they have hit luck not execution.
As hard as it is getting a job. The massive amount of work and time it will take. Building a network via proof of work [side projects] and hitting only your archetype with applications is still far more valuable for landing a role. With, and this is key, much higher levels of success than startups.