For founders

Why strong engineers ignore your outreach

It is almost never the message. It is who it came from, what it asked for, and the fact that the person reading it already has a job they like.

Zelcast

The engineers you most want are employed, paid well, and not looking, and they receive several near identical messages a week from people who have not read a line of their work. What your message is up against is the effort of replying at all. What raises a reply rate is who the message comes from, evidence that you know what the person actually built, and asking for something smaller than a job change.

The person you are writing to

Picture the actual reader. They are three years into a role they mostly like, they are paid at or above market, their equity is vesting, and their calendar is full. They are not unhappy enough to run a search, the ordinary state for most developers in the Stack Overflow developer survey, and the cost of engaging with you is not zero: it is a call they have to take at lunch and a conversation they have to have with themselves afterwards.

Against that, a generic message about an exciting opportunity gives them nothing to weigh. It asks for their time and arrives with no argument attached.

What the inbox looks like

Strong engineers get contacted constantly, and the messages are interchangeable. Same opening, same adjectives, same promise that this one is different. Most were sent by someone who found them through a filter and has never read their code or watched a talk they gave.

Once you have seen a hundred of these, you stop reading them individually. You pattern match on the first line and archive. Your message hits that wall. Rewriting the subject line does not get through it, because the subject line was never the problem.

What actually gets a reply

It came from someone they have reason to trust. A message from a founder whose product they respect, or a person who worked with them, clears the wall immediately. It is why introductions land when outreach does not, and most of the reason we exist. The longer version of that argument is in the best engineers are athletes now.

It shows you know what they built. Not their title and not their employer. The specific thing: a system they wrote about, a talk they gave, a library nobody uses but is very good. It is expensive and it does not scale. Those are the reasons it works.

It asks for less. A specific question about a specific problem is answerable in three lines. A job change is not. Plenty of good hires start as a conversation with no vacancy attached and turn into something a year later.

It says something true about the hard parts. Senior people are more attracted by an honest description of what is broken than by a list of perks. If your data model is a mess and the person you want has fixed one before, lead with that.

Things that do not work

Volume. Sending five hundred instead of fifty gets you more archives and a reputation among the people who talk to each other.

Compensation as the opening move. Leading with money reads as the only argument you have, and the people best able to evaluate the number are the least moved by it.

Urgency. A deadline on a life decision is a reason to say no, and everyone recognises the tactic.

Flattery without specifics. Telling someone their background is impressive when the message could be pasted to anyone confirms that it was.

What this means for how you hire

If your plan for filling a senior seat is cold outreach at volume, you have chosen the slowest path to the smallest pool. It works, slowly, and it works best for companies with a brand that does the persuading.

Most teams are better off spending the same hours on fewer people, or borrowing relationships from someone who has them. Borrowing is a strategy in itself. The engineers you want will take a call from a person they trust, and those relationships are the whole reason to have them.