A portal application competes with several hundred others for a filter's attention. A well-aimed email competes with the rest of someone's inbox — a much smaller crowd, and one where being specific stands out immediately.
Who to email
In order of response rate: the hiring manager for the team, a senior person on that team, the recruiter named in the posting, then the generic careers address. Founders answer their own email at companies under about fifty people.
Finding the address
Two guesses is enough. Repeated bounces from the same domain can land you in a spam filter.
- Company email patterns are usually firstname@ or firstname.lastname@ — check an existing employee's public email or a press release
- LinkedIn's contact info section, when they've made it public
- GitHub commit history, for engineers
- Conference talk slides and personal sites
The structure
- Subject — role and your single strongest credential: 'Backend engineer (Python, payments) — 5 yrs, 30-day notice'
- Line 1 — why them, specifically, in one sentence
- Line 2 — your closest matching proof, with a number
- Line 3 — the ask, and your availability
- Attachment — a PDF named yourname-role.pdf
A full example
Subject: Backend engineer (Python, payments) — 5 yrs, 30-day notice Hi Rohan — I saw Setu's post about moving settlement reconciliation in-house. I did that at PayFast: took the nightly batch to Celery workers handling ₹40 crore/day and cut the run from 3 hours to 20 minutes. Resume attached. I'm in Bengaluru, on 30 days' notice, and happy to do a short call this week if it's useful. Asha
What kills a cold email
- 'I am writing to express my interest in any suitable opening in your esteemed organisation'
- Attaching nothing, or attaching four files
- A paragraph about your career journey before anything relevant
- Sending the identical email to twenty companies with the name swapped — it shows
- Following up more than twice
Follow up once, after a week
One short reply to your own thread, adding something new — a project you shipped, a relevant article, an updated notice period. Then stop. A third follow-up converts interest into irritation.
Put this into practice
Build, score and tailor your resume with JotCV — free plan, no card needed.
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