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Dear recruiter - a canned response to a canned email

· 2 min read

First, thank you for reaching out. People like you help other people make a living by matching them with companies and opportunities.

If you got a link to this post from me that means that I read your email and find it irrelevant for my profile. It usually the case because:

  • Your role does not fit my experience. In my last role I led a team of ~70 engineers, managers and product managers in AWS. Is the scope you offer me similar? While I love being hands-on (read other posts in my blog) I am not looking to code full-time. How do you think that being a front-end/back-end/full-stack engineer in your team matches my current level and experience?
  • Your compensation is off. If you are trying to recruite top talent from a FAANG company you should be aware about their compensation expectations. Levels.fyi can give you an idea of what is expected in each level. Can this company offer a similar (or higher) pay to L7/M2 on Facebook/Google/Amazon? Also, while I’m sure your startup is about to take over the world- I’m not looking to get paid in virtual money stocks.
  • I don’t do meetings My time is important. Yours too. Time is the only currency we have. From reading your message I can see that there’s a low chance for a match so let’s save time and skip the meeting.

How can you do better next time? Invest more in research before reaching out. Spend most of your time on it. Don’t send generic messages to every engineer in your linkedin filter list. First, it will probably piss them off, second you will end up in the spam folder. Read about each potential candidate, evaluate their experience and only if you’re 80% sure there’s a match send them an email. The email should be catered towards their experience, showing how it can match this new role. Also do some homework on compensation and make sure the company can match the pay for the talent you are targeting. I do believe that a personalized message will get you a better response rate with the candidates you approach. Even if it will not be a fit, you will establish a good relationship with them. This can be very useful for the future.

I hope it helps. Sagiv