Oh, I get them all the time. Usually from junior engineers. I don't hold it against them - it's good advice.

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.

> So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped

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.

You got me there, I don't have one. I'm senior in my career but haven't been able to build a network that I can rely on when I'm looking for my next role, so I'm in the same boat with all of you guys and gals.

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.

>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.

If you haven't been on the market the past 2-3 years: I think we're at a point where we do indeed need to all "cause trouble" if we want anything to change. It's better than being ignored (AKA a soft blacklist) in my regards. If you think that way, the worst you can get is a "no".

>Also, when you reach out to the employees for "the referral", what does this even mean?

It used to mean what you described, yes. I worked with this person in a previous job or college and can vouch to their work ethic at worst, or ability to perform this exact role at best. A referral for me should be a 5 second decision based on seeing the person's name.

I'd personally never give a referral out to someone without that; at best, maybe I'd setup a small call myself and see their work for myself before giving a "cold referral". Most Code referrals don't even do that much, sadly. But I guess enough cold referrals have happened that even those are limited in effectiveness nowadays (as well as there simply not being many openings).

> 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?

I don't know, but I can't imagine the person whose job is not to look at resumes at all is going to do any better.

There's a tragedy of the commons thing here. It might work if people are getting one inbound email a week and they like reading them. Once it becomes common wisdom, suddenly J Random Employee has dozens of incoming cold emails distracting from their work. So all of them go in the bin.

I got a chance to talk to one of the recruiters at my company, informally. One takeaway is that it really depends on the type of work. Even now, there are work where a recruiter has to source - personally go out to seek specific candidates. Referals are even more important here.

It sounds so dystopian, but as someone who’s been searching for a while, I would enthusiastically use a site that charged $5 to apply to a job, with a guaranteed human review. I would target the most relevant postings, make my case in a cover letter, and signal to the hiring team that I believe in my qualification. But mostly, I’m paying to keep out the “I’ve sent out 1,200 resumes with no luck” people.

I guess it’s a shortcut to part of the advice in the article—requires realistic focus and targeting, but skips the cold emails.

> Don't do that.

> 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.

I guess the risk is that if the CEO doesn't like getting bothered and remembers your name, it might hurt your chances being hired in other ways?

Would you like to work for a company, where CEO is busy reprimanding people looking for a job, instead of doing his actual job, anyway?

If ceo receives 1000 resumes per month will it even matter?

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.

In that case it seems there is good upside and minimal downside. The upside is high chance of getting an interview. The downside is reducing your already very low baseline probability closer to zero.

This is a lot of words to say: you have nothing to lose by doing this.

I honestly don't know if it was sarcasm or if you were serious.

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

Blacklisting someone for sending a polite cold email to the CEO is bananas. No company worth working for will do this. Worst case is they will ignore you.

A judicious email to the hiring manager? Sure, why not roll the dice.

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.

Never spam a company, I agree. If you're going to "circumvent", pick one or two (and honestly, even 2 is pushing it) contacts you know the most and email them. And make sure they are at least related to the department you're going into unless it's an director/executive person (I'm not much more effective in getting someone a sales role as you would be going to the online portal). Anymore than that and you won't be seen any differently from a spam caller.

The goal is to personalize, not spray and pray all at one company.

If these candidates had some type of meaningful reach-out I would at least give them the time of day - but if you send me and 15 colleagues a generic, templates email in just comes off as lazy and a waste of our time. Considering our head of HR has to draft a memo on how to handle such candidates it truly morphed into a non-trivial situation for the firm.

I've interviewed 3k people with Karat as a professional interviewer, and several hundred more as a hiring manager. The very few times I received direct emails from candidates attempting to circumvent the normal process were met with unequivocally negative reactions. First, I find the Internet sleuthing they'd undergo to find my email address a bit creepy – for example, Karat would only show the first name and profile pic for your interviewer. But more importantly, the sheer audacity to go for such a stunt would firmly anchor them in the box of people I'd never want to work with. I'd still be polite and professional to a fault, of course, but I'd never seriously consider them past that point.

>circumvent the normal proces

I might agree in good, normal times.

But in bad times where "the normal process" can't even let you have a human look at your resume, it's different. "circumventing" is at worst a simple act of rebellion to annoy people who can change their process. It's a best a chance to actually get the response that isn't even granted with a form rejection these days.

> interviewed 3k people with Karat as a professional interviewer

Working for an interview mill is not the same as working for a company.

An interview mill’s objective is to assess whatever criteria their client told them in a somewhat repeatable way.

A company worker’s objective is to find someone who would be a good colleague or addition to the company.

There’s very little you can do wrong by sending someone a genuine email.

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.

> I've never gotten one in my entire career, and I was hiring manager in multiple companies/roles.

This may say more about how people interpret you, personally, than about the situation generally.

Idk, that is terrible advice. I've known several people who got hired because they emailed the CEO of 5-20 person startups.

Heck my CEO asks me all the time that people are messaging him and if i think they are interesting enough to hire.

If it's 5 person company they likely don't have HR or recruiting and the CEO is likely doing the hiring (for VPs/Directors/etc). In that case of course you would communicate with them directly, they are effectively a hiring manager and don't have HR to outsource the hiring to.

If the company has a person/group dedicated to hiring then going around them is counterproductive. IMHO of course!

Agreed. I've worked in startups most of my career, I've messaged CEO's, CEO's have been messaged, never a negative experience and higher quality candidates in my opinion.

Side note: You gotta hustle people!