Winning recruiter outreach messages

Writing the right outreach message is one of the most underestimated and neglected parts of recruitment. Whether you are a recruiter or founder directly reaching out to talent, you need to think carefully about the intent and content of your outreach messages.

In the current online world with an overflow of standardised and automated outreach messages from recruiters, candidates get scared off and frustrated.

Therefore, if you want to be successful with your outreach, you need to stand out by personalizing your message while communicating your intentions.

Some general guidelines to use while drafting your outreach message:

• Hyper personalize your message by referring to relevant professional facts about the candidate that you have found on public (!) sources online.
• Include personal facts only when they relate to the job or company you’re recruiting for or when the candidate mentions them on professional platforms, don’t mention the name of their cat that you found on Instagram (that’s kind of creepy).
• Don’t ask too many questions in your message, don’t make the candidate work hard in answering you. Keep things simple and provide value first.
• Don't be commercial or transactional, you're talking to a human being not to a robot.
• Provide one simple and frictionless call to action at the end of your message where the candidate can simply reply yes or no to.

Pick the channel before you write the message

The channel decides the shape of the message, so choose it first. A LinkedIn connection note, an InMail and an email are three different formats with three different limits, and writing 300 words of beautifully personalized copy for a box that accepts 200 characters is wasted effort.

LinkedIn's limits are tighter than most recruiters assume. On a basic (free) account you can attach a note to only a handful of invites per month, each capped at 200 characters. Premium lifts that to unlimited notes at 300 characters. LinkedIn's own help centre does not agree with itself on the monthly number: one page says three per month, another says five. Treat it as a handful, and check your own account before you plan a week of outreach around it.

InMail is the Premium and Recruiter route, and LinkedIn publishes real numbers on what works. In its analysis of tens of millions of recruiter InMails, messages under 400 characters got response rates 22% above average, while messages over 1,200 characters ran 11% below it. Only 10% of InMails are that short and 46% run past 800 characters - LinkedIn Talent Blog. The same analysis found individually sent messages beat bulk sends by roughly 15%, which is the whole argument of this article expressed as a number. Worth noting: that dataset covers May 2021 to April 2022, so treat it as direction rather than a current benchmark.

There is also a hard floor you are measured against. Under LinkedIn's Recruiter InMail Policy, recruiters must keep an InMail response rate of at least 13% across 100 or more InMails in every 14-day assessment period. If your outreach sits below 13%, that is not a matter of taste: LinkedIn itself treats it as underperforming.

Email is where most people end up, for two reasons. The free-tier note cap makes LinkedIn impractical for any real volume without paying, and plenty of engineers simply prefer a short, clear email to a social message. The catch is that email is the one channel where the address is not handed to you, so the bottleneck moves from writing the message to finding the inbox. Contact databases like Apollo are built for that step, and the free tier is enough to try it on a shortlist before you spend anything. Just go in knowing they were built for sales teams rather than recruiters, which shapes both what they find and what you should do with it.

Candidate outreach message examples

Messages to engineers

Engineers usually have a particular preference for how they want to be contacted. Some like to be contacted on social media and some want emails only with a clear concise subject line. Also they are receiving a ton of messages weekly and most of them are automated, so if you do your research and show that you have customised your message to them personally, your chances are significantly higher of getting a conversation with them.

Example 1

Hi [first name], I’ve been looking at your GitHub repos and was impressed with your Angular projects, especially the dev tools projects, not something I have seen a lot of people working on but seems to be very relevant.

With [your company name] we’re building out our [subject] app which is reaching 50k business clients and we’re looking for someone who’s able to not only write great code using Angular but who takes the junior team to the next level.

This is the product and tech stack we’re building on.

With the variety of your Angular projects and the level of complexity you’re handling, it seems to be something that you might love to do.

If you want to have a chat over this you can reply in short and I'll take care of arranging our chat. Enjoy this sunny day! [your name]

Example 2

Hi [first name], I saw you mentioned to be open to recruiter outreach but like to keep it short. So here we go, with [company name] we’re building the next generation of API Marketplaces. I see you have been back-end engineering leading marketplaces before. Here’s more about the job that’s open with [company name] including salary range and a bit more about the product.

Let me know if you want to talk, pick a moment that suits best here or simply reply in short.

Enjoy the day, [your name]

Messages to sales executives

Sales executives are used to a direct and commercial form of communication. So you should get to the point quickly, but just like in building any other relationship you should not be too transactional. Remember, these people haven’t heard about you before and don’t know anything about you when they receive your message. Show that you did your research and explore if you like to learn a bit more from each other.

Example 1

Hi [first name], I saw you’re nailing it at [company name]. Seems like you’re on fire with the new clients you’re signing, congrats! We’re continuously looking for great sales execs to sell our SaaS product across different industries. Our sales execs are talking to c-suite from SMB to big corporates and they typically love the variety of their clients.

Let me know if you want to have a chat to see where you are now and what your potential next steps are, in the short or long term.

[your name]

Example 2

Hi [first name], must have been a great adventure helping [company name] and [company name] grow. Not many people can say they have worked with two startups that grew that fast. We’re looking for people like you. We’re on a mission to radically change the way people find people with our talent search engine (Here's more about our product vision). We are looking for one of our first sales execs who will be responsible for growing our client base and driving revenue in the European market.

We are a well funded startup (3M in funding) and growing fast: 50% MoM in revenue.

Let me know if you’d like to have a chat on Zoom or just send me a reply.

[your name]

LinkedIn connection invite messages (200 characters free, 300 on Premium)

LinkedIn connection invites are short and require a different approach than longer and more substantive emails or InMails. The goal of a LinkedIn connection invite is to have the candidate accept your invite so you can, once connected, continue the conversation with more detail and comment on each other's LinkedIn updates.

Mind the cap that applies to your account. The two examples below are 297 characters, so they fit Premium's 300 but will not fit the 200-character note on a basic account. Example 3 is the version that fits everywhere.

Example 1 (297 characters, Premium only)

Hi [first name], I saw your extensive experience with [skill1] and [skill2]. We’re building the next [product vision statement]. Would be great to connect and follow you. We’re continuously looking for the best tech talent like you. We can always have a chat when it’s a good time. Kr, [your name]

Example 2 (297 characters, Premium only)

Hi [first name], I saw you post a lot on [topic1a]. What are your thoughts on [topic1b]? I’m always looking for people with a voice in this industry and they are quite rare I can tell you. We’re trying to change [company mission statement]. Would be great to connect on this topic. Kr, [your name]

Example 3 (193 characters, works on a free account)

Hi [first name], your [skill1] work at [company name] is why I am reaching out. We are building [product vision statement] and hiring for it. Happy to connect and stay in touch. Kr, [your name]

Example 3 drops the flattery and the second sentence about your company, which is what the 200-character cap forces you to do. That is not a downgrade. The shorter note is closer to what LinkedIn's own data rewards, and the detail you cut is exactly what you should be saying after they accept, when you have a real conversation instead of a box.

Follow up once, then stop

One follow-up is the whole cadence. Most recruiters either send a single message and give up, or run a six-touch sequence that reads as automated and earns a block, which is the failure mode this article opened with. A single, short, genuinely additive follow-up after roughly a week catches the people who read your first message on a phone and meant to reply.

Make the follow-up carry new information rather than repeat the ask. A "just bumping this to the top of your inbox" message adds nothing and tells the candidate you are working a list. Sharing the team's engineering blog post, the salary range, or the fact that the role now reports to someone they would recognise gives them a reason to reconsider that did not exist a week ago.

Measure it against a real number. LinkedIn's 13% InMail floor is a fair benchmark for any channel: if you are personalizing properly and still sitting well under it across 100+ messages, the problem is your targeting or your offer, not your copy. No template fixes a role that people do not want.