Stop Sending Recruiters Cold Emails & Get Them To Reply By Doing This Instead

Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: And the outcome of doing all these things is that you’re building relationships before you need them. Right? What you don’t wanna do is start reaching out to people the day after you lost your job or the day you see a job you wanna apply to and you have no history with them. Hey there. I’m Sarah Doody, host of the career strategy podcast. Many professionals are seeking more impact, flexibility, growth, and let’s face it, getting paid what they’re worth. But how do you unlock this in your career? It starts with strategy. I’m taking you behind the scenes of what’s working for my career coaching clients. You’ll hear strategies and actionable, yet sometimes against the grain, advice for how you can be the CEO of your career and stop dreading Mondays.

Sarah Doody [00:00:51]: Ready to level up your career? Let’s get after it. Welcome back to another episode of the career strategy podcast. And today, we are addressing a topic that people ask me about all of the time. Why do recruiters, hiring managers, etcetera, not reply to my cold messages. Maybe this has happened to you. You have sent a recruiter a DM, an email, etcetera, and nothing. Right? And then you start to worry, and you start to think, do they not like me? Did I say the wrong thing? Did I not have a good enough subject line? Was there a spelling mistake? You catastrophize and think about all of the reasons why they didn’t reply to your cold messages. So, today, we’re going to talk about what can make the difference and flip this so that people actually start replying to your messages.

Sarah Doody [00:01:51]: And the truth is people are more likely to engage with someone they’re already familiar with, right? So, if your messages are going unanswered and you feel like you’re ghosted all the time, it’s time to stop being perceived as a cold contact and start warming up those connections. So you’re perceived essentially as a lukewarm connection. Someone that the recipient already is familiar with, whether they recognize your name, your face, your email address, whatever it is. But this is going to shift you from being perceived as a cold message in their inbox. So in this episode, we’re gonna cover 5 LinkedIn strategies to help you go from being perceived as a total stranger to a more familiar lukewarm presence in someone’s inbox. Alright. Let’s dive in. So part 1, let’s briefly talk about the problem here.

Sarah Doody [00:02:54]: Right? Why cold messages get ignored? Essentially, recruiters and hiring managers are busy. You see on LinkedIn, 100 of people apply to roles. Right? And so if you put yourself in their shoes, many recruiters and hiring managers are not just hiring for one role, they’re hiring for multiple roles. So if you times 100 applicants times 5 roles or 200 or 300 applicants times 5 roles, that’s a lot of applicants. And if some percent of those applicants are all sending cold messages, that floods the inbox really, really quickly. And that’s why it’s so easy for them to miss your message or just not even reply. That is also why it is so crucial to build and create familiarity for you as a person and as a candidate before you ever hit apply, before you ever hit send on that DM or email. So the solution here is that we’re going to leverage the channel of LinkedIn to help you become familiar, so that you’re a lukewarm candidate, a lukewarm contact for when you do send people messages, you’re going to be more likely to stand out and less likely to get ghosted.

Sarah Doody [00:04:20]: And I know some of you hate LinkedIn. You think it’s horrible. You have all these reasons. Fine. You can still hate LinkedIn and use it in a strategic way to build and nurture relationships. I, myself, get annoyed with LinkedIn quite often, but I hang out there because I know that’s where the people I want to connect with hang out. Right? So if you have resistance to hanging out on LinkedIn, you kind of have to ask yourself, do I wanna be visible? If yes, where are the people that I want to be visible to? And if the answer is LinkedIn, then guess what? You kinda have to hang out on LinkedIn even if your soul is telling you you don’t wanna be there. Alright.

Sarah Doody [00:05:09]: So let’s dive into our 5 strategies to go from cold to lukewarm. Number 1, you need to go follow people you want to create or nurture relationships with. Notice I said, follow and not connect yet. So, we wanna go follow these people. Why? Because when you follow them, this increases likelihood that when you log in to LinkedIn and go to your feed, you’re going to see posts by these people. And if you’re seeing posts from the people that you wanna connect with, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to like, to write a comment, etcetera. Right? You can connect with them later, but let’s just start with following. Alright.

Sarah Doody [00:05:56]: No. Number 2. We need you to start reacting to the content from the people you just followed. Okay? So what do I mean by react? It’s really about using that like button or a heart or clap, whatever you wanna do. Do that. This is like giving a virtual nod to someone that’s like, that was cool, that was interesting, thanks for posting that, etcetera. But we don’t wanna stop there. It’s not enough just to like stuff and heart stuff.

Sarah Doody [00:06:29]: You’re going to become an even more lukewarm connection when you leave thoughtful comments. And, the key here is thoughtful. I didn’t say leave one word comments, I said leave thoughtful comments. So we’re gonna go beyond simple comments or vague comments or robotic comments like, thanks for sharing your ideas or cool, neat, you know, appreciate you posting this, etcetera, and let’s leave longer more thoughtful sentences. Now, we don’t need to be leaving paragraph long replies, although if you want to, great. It could just be 1 or 2 sentences. Here’s the thing though, which is going to lead us to point number 4, We wanna be authentic, not robotic. I know it is tempting to use AI to write your LinkedIn comments for you.

Sarah Doody [00:07:21]: And I promise people can see and spot and sense the AI comments. I’ve read a lot of articles about this, and I, myself, am the recipient of a lot of robotic comments. And I can spot them a mile away. And what do I often do? Sometimes I delete them or it just doesn’t catch my attention and I’m not gonna click that person’s profile to go engage with them because I’m like, oh, they’re using robot AI comments. Like, I’m not gonna have a conversation with them. I know that probably sounds brutal, but it is true. It also just starts to feel really repetitive. If a lot of people are using AI tools to help them write LinkedIn comments, sometimes those tools are spitting out very similar replies all of the time.

Sarah Doody [00:08:10]: So just don’t use them. Use your own brain and write your own comments. Alright. Number 5, our last one. We wanna move the conversations to the DMs or direct messages. There may be times when you comment on someone’s post or reply to someone’s comment and you start going back and forth. That’s an opportunity to take the conversation to their DMs. Just send them a DM and say, like, hey, I wanted to bring this over here so we could talk about this more deeply or something like that, or I don’t wanna let let our conversation, you know, get lost on that post.

Sarah Doody [00:08:46]: Many things you could say, but it’s great way to kind of move that relationship on a little more is what I’m trying to say. Alright. So, moving the conversation to the DMs, especially if you’ve gone back and forth in comments a bunch of times, might be a sign to just take it into the DMs. And then you might be like, hey. I have a question for you, or hey. I noticed this, that, the other about your, you know, career history or something. And you could ask them, you know, other questions that maybe they would be less likely to answer if it was embedded in, like, a LinkedIn comment or something like that. It really just allows for more personal and meaningful discussions, which can strengthen the relationship and open up new opportunities.

Sarah Doody [00:09:34]: And the outcome of doing all these things is that you’re building relationships before you need them. Right? What you don’t wanna do is start reaching out to people the day after you lost your job or the day you see a job you wanna apply to, and you have no history with them. Because guess what? That’s a cold message. That’s a cold contact. That’s a cold touch point. And people are gonna be more likely to engage with you if you are perceived as lukewarm. Okay? And I wanna give you a quick example. We had a senior UX researcher in my career coaching program called Career Strategy Lab.

Sarah Doody [00:10:14]: And this user researcher, we’ll call him Danielle. Danielle followed all of these steps, and she ended up having a coffee chat with a product manager for roles she was interested in. That built this connection before the formal interview process even started. And then during the interviews, she said the interview felt like more of a natural conversation and less like an interrogation. And she ended up getting a job, and now I’m gonna paraphrase, but she essentially said this was the most natural feeling way that the interview process went and that frankly getting any other job felt like because it felt like she already knew people at the company. And so it wasn’t this weird thing when she sent them an email or message and that helped her then get actual replies from those people. Right? So this works because it turns these very transactional cold emails into lukewarm connections that are more likely to receive replies. And we go way into this in career strategy lab, we have a whole sprint all about relationships, connections, etcetera.

Sarah Doody [00:11:35]: But for today, I’m gonna leave it at that. So, before you start engaging in LinkedIn, this is our final tip, you wanna make sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date. Right? Because it doesn’t make sense to start engaging and then increasing the chances that people are gonna go to your LinkedIn profile. If your LinkedIn profile is not up to date or is a bunch of spelling mistakes or you’re not making great use of the top banner image at the top of your profile or your photo needs an update or something like that. Right? So, before you do any of this, go update your LinkedIn profile first. And then, save this episode, so you can go do the 5 things we just talked about. Alright. So, that is all for today.

Sarah Doody [00:12:18]: I know that was a lot. I feel like I was talking super fast. But, in the spirit of action, I want you to take action. Whether that is updating your LinkedIn profile, so you’re ready to do these 5 things, or if your LinkedIn profile is ready to go, start doing these 5 things today. If you have ideas for companies you want to apply to, then go find 5 people at those companies and follow them on LinkedIn and just make that your action item for today. Then in the days to follow, you can start seeing their posts, reacting to their posts, leaving thoughtful comments, and moving those conversations to the DMs without using AI to write your comments because that’s gonna ruin all this for you. Right? Okay. So if you want more step by step guidance on your LinkedIn profile, on relationship building, or anything else in the job search, like creating your portfolio, negotiating, even figuring out what is next in your career and coming up with what I refer to as a career roadmap for your career, then you might be a great candidate for career strategy lab, which was my 3 month career coaching program.

Sarah Doody [00:13:39]: For mid and senior ish UX and product people who wanna be ready for their next opportunity or are in a job search right now, we’re gonna help you get all your materials ready to go, not waste time in your job search. So you can increase the odds that you get hired with a 5 figure salary increase or more. All right. If you wanna learn more, just go to career strategy lab dotcom. That’s all for today. I will talk to you in the next episode. Thanks for listening to the career strategy podcast. Make sure to follow me, Sarah Dutti, on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn.

Sarah Doody [00:14:18]: If anything in today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it. Tag me on social media or send me a DM. And lastly, if you found this episode helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with a friend or give us a quick rating on Spotify or review on Apple Podcasts. Catch you later.