Composing a Successful Personalized Message
A successful personalized introductory message shows that you have done your due diligence by referencing their work or something you have seen on their profiles.
Demonstrate how their experience, background and skills will apply to the role you are considering them for
Describe the high and low level vision for the overall company and position
Describe the company culture, perks and “fun facts”
Sample Message From a Series B+ Company with Over a 70% Acceptance Rate
Hi Candidate,
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is X, and I am a Technical Recruiter for Company A. I saw your profile on Hired and I was very impressed by your experience at Eventbrite and the Kaggle competitions you competed in.
I am reaching out to you because I feel you would be a great fit for our Data Engineer role. What we are looking for is someone who can implement machine learning algorithms using Java and/or Python, work with statistical modeling technologies such as R or SciPy, and be responsible for building out our data warehouse infrastructure. Right now we are using MySQL but would like to migrate to a NoSQL solution (Hadoop, MongoDB, or Cassandra).
We have an engineering team of 10 and we are looking to add solid contributors to really scale our product in the coming year.
What we are doing here at Company A is building a whole new type of software. We are occupying the space in enterprise software where nothing originally has been before. You will be working on engineering problems to help in leading our efforts to untangle the tricky business of the science of sales and relationships.
Which activities drive outcomes? What works and what doesn't? Which insights are actionable, which are distractions? If you are interested in connecting or even in just having a casual conversation let me know.
Thanks!
Sample Message From a Seed Stage Company with an Over 75% Acceptance Rate
Hi Candidate,
I’m Joe from Y in San Francisco. We’re a well-funded, early stage startup carving out a niche in the mobile business intelligence space. There are only 3 of us at the company and each of us independently read and were impressed by your profile!If you’re looking for an early stage company where you can learn and add value, we should definitely talk.
We are building ourselves a nice foothold in the mobile app data ecosystem and need a creative, data-focused engineer to really nail the opportunity.
Background on us: This is the second startup for all of us. The two cofounders’ first startup was acquired by B, while they were still in the nascent stages of building X. I joined Y early on as a PM (my startup was also acquired by B;). We launched and grew B to hundreds of millions of users. It was pretty wild!
What are we working on now? Well, there are a ton of huge opportunities in the mobile app space. Right now, we’re sprinting toward release of an analytics service which weaves together data from the myriad of 3rd party services mobile developers use.
Happy to explain more by phone.
Since we’re so early, we have a ton of flexibility around how we work, where we work and what we’re working on. So, we get to do awesome things like work a week from Tahoe or Hawaii (we’re planning our next excursion right now). We can also be really generous with equity.We work at a really fast pace, ship early and often but also carve out the time to have fun.
Would love to set up a quick phone call to get to know each other better!
Thanks,