Ask HN: How many cold emails do you get? I'm in software sales and I have to send cold emails for a living. Given that I'm not typically on the receiving end of that type of outreach, I'm curious how often non-sales people are hit with it. How often do you get cold emails? What's your public job title if you do? How often do you ignore them, respond negatively, or respond positively? |
I get a lot of recruiters emailing, too. If they're trying to get me to hire ICs, I typically ignore them. If they have candidates that are around my level, I may respond to add them to my network in case I decide to look for a job again and need to find some non-obvious opportunities.
But as far as getting me to hire someone, it's wildly ineffective, IMO.
The bigger problem is the vast majority emails I read do not understand our business. The last time I made the mistake of speaking to a sales rep (I believe it was DataDog) they simply did not have the technical depth to understand what they were selling or why it was like asking me if I needed a reciprocating saw to bake cakes.
Before I set my linkedin status to "open to work" I would get at least one cold one per day, every day. Ignored every single one of them. Amazon started emailing me once every week like clockwork, a different recruiter and team each time somehow.
Now that I've changed the linkedin status it's more like 3 per day consistently. I may reply to like 2 of those per week.
In my work email I'll maybe get 1 random cold email a week from either a recruiter looking to sell a candidate to us, or a company trying to sell us their thing. I ignore them since they're usually not at all overlapping with our field or desires, in the rare chance that the recruiter may be relevant I'll forward it to a manager where it'll disappear in to a void.
The cold emails from locals have been my favorites though, for sheer variety of scope. One local guy said he was retiring as an engineer and looking for $35/hr. contract work having to do with databases. He sent me a list of everything he thought sucked about my website.
Another local person said they couldn't find any other places to pitch to because my local SEO was too good (it's not that great, but it is a rural area).
Good luck in your work, I used to do sales support many years ago and it seemed like one could get really involved in the technique side for effective leverage.
I was told that I received several thousand per day when I worked for a startup that evolved into a big corporation. It did not help that my email was in the ARIN/RIPE contact fields for our address space. I never saw them because ProofPoint and O365 rules quarantined all of them.
What's your public job title if you do?
I was a bit of everything in engineering and operations when we started. As we evolved I had a few different titles. I don't actually remember them.
How often do you ignore them
If I were ever to have seen them I would have ignored them. If the business had a need for something I would research vendors, who backs them, their history and then decide which ones to contact and start negotiating proof of concept hardware or PoC account creation to try out the service.
It's all software vendors or consulting companies or recruiters trying to hit me up and win our company's business by pitching how they can staff me with resources or provide some service we don't need.
I just ignore them to be honest. I'm swamped with work as it is, juggling multiple projects, and most of them offer things we're not interested in.
The worst is when I get calls on my phone from rando sales people. IDK how they got my number.
Basically a 0% chance I'd respond to any of those cold outreaches be it via email or phone.
I also get 2 or 3 emails from one of my banks with silly promotions or recommendations. Each time my mouse is hovering over the spam button in gmail, and each time I remember that I must go and close that account as soon as possible.
VP Product Development (I have 3 eng teams, each with a product mgr)
I typically respond with a cordial “No Thanks, best of luck.”