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.
You can of course achieve the same "the top guys at this growing company are sufficiently interested in me for this not to be an HR-lead timewaste" effect with a senior non-recruiter email that's actually honest, more along the lines of
My colleague Bob was impressed by your [personalised details]. I've asked Bob to look for people with X and our stack is based entirely on Y which I understand you're very familiar with. If you're interested in working on Z in future perhaps you and Bob could grab a quick coffee, and if that works out I'd love to have the chance to learn more about [personalised detail] for myself at some point.
> 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.
Yes.
I get contacted by a headhunter that says they know of a company looking for engineers. I go on an interview and someone at the company asks me very officiously, "Why do you want to work for this company?" I respond, "I don't know that I do want to work here. I have a job. The headhunter called me and told me there was an opportunity here so I came to check it out". The interviewer didn't say anything, but their expression was slightly shocked. I guess I was supposed to launch into a pitch about how it was always my dream to work at that company.
I think you put your finger on it. They present it to you as the CEO begging you to come work at the company. Then you start finding out it is a bait and switch, they want you to play the role of a desperate job seeker, begging some low-level manager for an opportunity to work at the company.
It's a power thing. We see CEO's here and in the tech news complain that they can't find good technical talent. Yet every part of the job process is designed to demonstrate they have the power in the relationship from the offset. They want references - before you have a job offer often, they want you to ask a favor from two to three people to sing your praises to them. If you tell them you won't give them references until it's the last step before a job offer they look surprised. Or they just hand you a form to fill out, which will be incomplete if you don't put references. They want you to come interview for hours in the middle of your work day. Often you get there and they tell you some important person who has to interview you to get the job is not there, and you have to come back again. You also have to go through the indignity of not being candid - if you want the job offer. When they ask you why you left your last company, that your boss was a jerk is not an acceptable answer. If they ask you about unit tests at your current job, and you say you have asked management to allow time for putting in unit tests but they refused - it becomes your fault that your management told you no. And on and on and on. That I have to ask for a favor from 2-3 former coworkers or bosses that they give me a reference every time I apply for a job is probably the most annoying part.
Who wants to go through all of this? It's why a lot of my jobs are at companies my friends work for. At least I know the score before I go in.
Agreed. I got an offer from a YC company about a year ago. The offer was lower than I currently make by a large margin. I tried to negotiate, and the CEO came back in a huff and basically said I was an idiot for turning down the job, and why do I even bother with startups in the first place if I want so much money? Well, that's the thing, dude. I don't need your job. You need me. You got the whole thing backwards.
Anyway, yeah, I agree with you completely.
(And by the way, keep pushing on the unit test thing. It's something worth arguing for. Or next time, build in unit tests into the project estimate instead of setting it aside as a separate project. Good luck.)
But they were offering you to change the world dude! Like social and big data and cloud!
This issue was discussed quite a lot on HN over past couple of years. Not sure what those so called CEOs are thinking but it's their lose.
There must be some significant personal benefit for me, above money, that I would consider an offer like that. Influential position in a startup working in an area which I find exciting and proof that founders know what they are doing? Yeah something like that.
I mean, if he'd met me halfway, I probably would have taken the offer. But he didn't. He just basically told me to fuck off. I'm not really sure why he didn't expect negotiation. Maybe I negotiated badly. Sadly, if he'd been polite and said something along the lines of "We just can't afford that salary level. I'm sorry we couldn't work things out," then maybe in a year, when I'm out of a job for whatever reason, I might be willing to come back and take that offer, or at least entertain a new one. But no, he burned that bridge. Either way, I think I dodged a bullet.
But you're right. If he'd made me CTO or some other personal benefit, I would have taken the offer in a heartbeat. For a regular dev salary with regular dev equity, it just wasn't enough. Plus, I already get equity at my current publicly-traded company, which means my equity is worth actual cash. I dunno. The whole thing annoyed me.
They're a YC company and got another round of funding a few months ago, so I imagine they're still around and doing okay. The same job listings are still on their website. Not sure if they've filled any of them or not. shrug
I don't have much faith that they'll do well, but I'm not a VC for a reason, so.. :)
That's happened to me too. My response is "I don't" and then I shut up.
To overgeneralize, though not by much, SF startups suck ass at recruiting; the standard assumption is the whole world is chomping at the bit to work there, and it's a privilege to do so. (Though I do wonder how they get that worldview to comport with endless bitching about the lack of engineers.)
And you hit the nail on the head with the lack of consideration of recruitees' time. Take linkedin. I interviewed there a couple years ago when I was living in sf. They wanted me to come in 10 - 3, so basically an entire day of vacation (read ~$300-$400 I won't get paid out when I quit.) So I had a nontrivial amount of skin in the game. I also had to borrow a car to drive there, since I didn't own one. The interviews went really well, and they where pushy about continuing -- I was privileged to be able to come in a second day between 10 and 1, ie a second 1/2 day of vacation and go rent a car again! Fuck that; I bounced. But no doubt they're telling congress they just can't hire locally and need more h1b allotment.
I understand that it has to be a good fit both ways and both parties have to sell themselves to the other, but "I don't" implies you're wasting everyone's time. Even "I don't, yet" is 100x better, and that's still a really lame response. If you want to be pitched to, just say so.
So you invested hundreds of dollars and they invested hundreds of dollars (in the form of their employee time) trying to determine if you'd be a person they could give $n0,000 cash annually in exchange for $y0,000 of your services. From a sales perspective a deal of this size seems worth spending hundreds of dollars on. Is there a reason it was too much money to spend in this instance?
> I go on an interview and someone at the company asks me very officiously, "Why do you want to work for this company?" I respond, "I don't know that I do want to work here. I have a job. The headhunter called me and told me there was an opportunity here so I came to check it out". The interviewer didn't say anything, but their expression was slightly shocked. I guess I was supposed to launch into a pitch about how it was always my dream to work at that company.
I rather see it differently. As you said, you have a job and the head hunter told you that this company had opportunities. So common sense dictates that you check briefly what they have to offer before going to the interview. Is it a better pay (you could tell the recruiter "I am currently making X, what would they be willing to offer?"), the chance to use a technology you don't use at your current work place, or you really like what the company is doing - if it's Planetary Resources or Khan Academy that would be understandable.
So if I was the interviewer, I would be surprised about that guy who comes to the interview without bothering to check what's on the table. Apart from that, I agree with you that the recruiting process of many companies is partly designed to show who is the boss, and it's a sad thing IMHO.
This. And you could do it both ways, too. "I'm very interested in learning X technology, and my background with Y skillset makes me a good fit. From what I can see, this seems like a cool company. That said, one of your people contacted me first, so I'm here to find out more about the position."
Oof that's rough. I guess a sixth point is "follow through on your commitment" — baiting and switching is a lot worse than having never sent the email in the first place.
Agreed. It gives me a bad impression, which means I'm less likely to want to actually meet up with them, and that puts me in the awkward position of having agreed to meet for coffee and then now declining further invitations. I don't want to burn any bridges, but at the same time, I'm not interested in working with someone who'll do the bait-and-switch. It puts me in a very difficult situation.
You should call the CEO directly and ask him when he'd like to meet for the coffee he wanted to have. CEO's can be interesting to talk with, they have unique and fascinating perspectives.
Yeah, this. If I were to do a dumb dick move like this, I'd much rather have the candidate call me out on it than blow me off. I'd be really excited to meet a candidate whose first real interaction with me is to tell me I'm being an asshole and be right about it.
I actually CC'd the CEO on my reply, wherein I basically implied that the previous email was misleading and that I was expecting a less formal mode of communication. But like someone else said, I don't think the CEO actually sent that first email. I suspect the recruiter sent it on his behalf.
Recruiter here. Sending emails as the CEO is standard practice at a ton of companies. That being said, where I work, we do not do this because, if you think about it logically, the only reason to do these reachouts is if the CEO actually wants to/has the time to speak with the person. If they do, they can send these emails. But to send them as the CEO and then magically turn into a recruiter when I get a response is super sketchy and weird so I don't do it.
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.
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.
Well, do you recognize my email address as bein one you contacted? You don't have a profile here, and your username looks unrelated to the person who contacted me.
I was using indeed.com, it doesn't seem to be possible to review the emails I sent.
If you are interested in a serious, post-seed, pre-A startup opportunity please contact me at dan.miller at orgstars.com
And if that doesn't work, we can still discuss the (intellectually dishonest) libertarian arguments against the carbon tax. I actually care about stuff like that.
I suspect that they're using the CEO to get your attention. I'd be very surprised if the original email came from him. As can be seen here it's kind of nuts to do all this work only to pass off ot someone else when there is a bite.
I had the complete opposite thing happen. There is a dude I went to school with, I know him personally. We are connections on linkedin. He started a company a few years back. I get an email from a recruiter telling me the founders at Company X (his company) felt that I would be a good fit for their team. I am convinced that she just searched for some skill sets and made this form letter up just to make it sound fancy.
I've frequently had headhunters try to introduce me to people that I already know. It goes with the territory - at least it tells me they're on the right track. :-)
Ha. I've had recruiters try to set me up with companies that I've already interviewed with, and once I had a recruiter try and set me up with a company I'd already received an offer from (but declined for various reasons). It's not really their fault, though. They can't know the details of my personal network and history. Still, it makes for funny stories...
It's totally company's fault in that case, although not the recruiter's. If you get contacted by a company who previously gave you an offer, that means the company isn't investing their recruiting function by taking the simple step of buying a decent applicant tracking system. There's poor communication between the executives and the people they hire or contract, and they have zero HR.
Not the OP, but I got contacted on LinkedIn by a recruiter who appeared to completely miss my LinkedIn connection to the CEO of the company he was recruiting me for. That seemed like completely his fault.
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.
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.
Out of curiosity, why do you tend to reply to recruiting emails when they demonstrate some knowledge of who you are? Although most recruiters don't do that, it's still fairly well-known (at least around here) that recruiters should do that at the bare minimum. So it seems to me that a mention of some fact about my life or work just means their recruiting team is more well-managed or -staffed. Maybe they tell their recruiters to spend 5 minutes on each person looking for a GitHub or Twitter account. Unless there's a positive correlation between the quality of a recruiting team and the desirability of the job being offered (which I doubt), I don't see why you would reply to these sorts of recruiting emails.
I would imagine it has to do with the level of respect afforded. If I suspect that someone is just cold-emailing everyone who fits [x] query, then I'm going to treat that email with as much time as they gave it (in other words, enough time to file and ignore it). On the other hand, if it's obvious that someone spent even 5 minutes looking at my GitHub or my blog, then I can certainly give them at least 5 minutes in return (a quick "not interested" or "can you tell me some more").
I suspect it's somewhat like spam filtering. So many recruiters don't do this that it's an easy way to differentiate yourself and get through (as the recruiter). When everyone starts doing this -- having mined info from all your public profiles and auto-generated an optimised mail -- then it all becomes noise again. The cycle behind anew.
oddevan and amirmc both point out parts of why I'd afford a reply, but it's also a signal to me that the person is at least asserting they believe something about the opportunity, having researched me ahead of time, is worth my time, even if I don't immediately see it from the initial email. It also helps me to form a what will hopefully be a useful reply, having at least partially understood where they're coming from.
Most of the time, I get emails from recruiters for things that are nowhere close to my areas of expertise or what I've publicly talked about, and they could've saved both of us the time if they did just spend 5 minutes looking me up. It boggles my mind sometimes how they thought I'd be interested or even qualified. I used to reply back to those recruiters as well asking how they came across me, and usually received nothing back.
So it may just be a gimmicky tactic, but it's one that works, at least with people like me. I should be so lucky to have every recruiting email demonstrating some knowledge about me or what I've done.
> it's also a signal to me that the person is at least asserting they believe something about the opportunity, having researched me ahead of time, is worth my time, even if I don't immediately see it from the initial email.
But if they are under instructions to do so, then it's not a reliable signal of anything except that they are following instructions and those instructions are slightly more modern than. But now that I'm thinking about it more, I suppose that is a reasonable positive signal, simply because that means their recruiters must be spending a lot more time (maybe 5 minutes vs. 1 minute) per candidate. At the bare minimum, that tells you that they were willing and able to dedicate more resources to finding candidates.
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.
The reverse of this is also true by the way. When applying for a job, include a real cover letter that shows you actually know something about the company you're applying for. It doesn't have to be long, but there's nothing that moves a resume to the bottom of the stack faster than a cover letter that obviously just has the company name and maybe a couple other fields swapped in. (Or in some cases even forgotten, so you get a cover letter where someone tells you how much they'd love to work for some other company!)
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...
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.
>>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
The technique also works for job-hunters writing to companies. Your cold emails should always mention something specific and personal about the recipient.
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?
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...
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.
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.
"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, 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".
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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), 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.