You just applied to a job and are wondering if and how you should message the hiring manager? First of all, you should absolutely message the hiring manager. It will not only help you stand out from the 99% who don’t but it will also show that you are proactive. You’re conveying that if you are proactive enough to send an email, you are also likely proactive enough in your job.
The biggest issue is how to send a message to a recruiter? In 90% of cases, the name of the recruiter won’t appear on a job description. Even when their name appears, recruiters are bombarded with LinkedIn messages so your message will likely not be seen and have little to none impact.
The solution? Send an email!
There are two ways to do that. There is the manual way (I will show you below) and the automated way, leveraging tools like PitchMeAI.
PitchMeAI is a Chrome extension that currently (written in October 2024) works on LinkedIn. The extension allows you to find the recruiter details and their emails in a single click. You do need to be on their premium plan to do so - it costs $22/m. For that cost, you will get access to all the recruiters’ emails (and will also get unlimited credits to generate personalized resumes for each position).
When LinkedIn shows you the box, PitchMeAI will add an ‘Email’ button to it so you can easily email the recruiter. The extension will also offer you to generate the intro email for yourself. Here is how it will look:
In this case, PitchMeAI will create a "Meet the hiring team" box for you and uncover the hiring manager's email, so you can email them directly.
PitchMeAI provides you a ready-to-be-sent intro email that is leveraging your resume and the job description. You can (and maybe should) edit it before you send it.
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If you don’t have that budget, don’t worry! There is also a manual path. It’s slower and more tedious but it’s free. We can divide the manual path in 2 steps:
To do that, you need to look at the job description. Is it written who is the role reporting too? Search on LinkedIn for the company and take a look at the employees. Who do you think is the person you would report to? Are you a Software Engineer? Then the hiring manager is probably going to be Head of Engineering or CTO. Once you find 2-3 potential names, write them down. Also write down the name of the CEO of the company, we will need that in the 2nd step.
Now, we will find the email addresses of these 2-3 people you wrote down in the first step. This is a trick I learned a long time ago. Typically companies have the same format for emails (John Doe ->jdoe@supercompany.com) so you can infer the email addresses of most employees if you find the email address of one person (the CEO in our case). How to do it:
Once you found the email address, it’s time to write a short intro email. The goal of the email is for the hiring manager to be curious enough to interview you and mention to HR they want to speak with you. These are the best practice:
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