A few hiring manager outreach emails that actually got me interviews
Over the past couple of months I've sent ~30 cold emails/LinkedIn InMails to hiring managers. Got 5 callbacks. Background: 10 years in strategy/consulting, no AI title on my resume, but I'm applying for AI-native roles where ATS would probably screen me out on keywords alone. Been applying for relatively senior roles (Director, Principal, etc.) Sharing 3 messages that worked for me. Generally used Claude to write the initial draft but then still iterated on it myself.
- A hiring manager (VP) who went to the same school as me. Got to the final round in this one, but didn't get the job.
Hi xxx,
Michigan alum, also in Boulder. Small world gets smaller.
I saw thexxx role on the AI side at xxx. I've spent the last year building and shipping AI tools. Not strategy decks about AI. Actual working products. An AI-powered competitive intelligence system that replaced a manual process at Verizon Connect. A decision-support tool that's live at xxx.
The MCP expansion piece in the JD caught my eye because I've been hands-on with agentic workflows and tool-use patterns. The subscription billing context is new to me, but the core problem (turning AI from a feature into actual merchant value) is exactly what I've been solving.
Would love 20 minutes to hear how you're thinking about the AI roadmap and share what I've been building.
Go Blue.
- Outreach to a VP who incubated a startup from a larger company. This one is the most generic of the three, and I think it worked despite the writing, not because of it. The shared incubation background did the work. Didn't get passed the hiring manger interview round on this one.
Hi xxx,
I saw that you incubated and launched xxx after a year of intense customer-focused research at xxx. I love that. My consulting background is similar: customer discovery, hypothesis validation and early stage strategy.
I've also spent the last two years building AI systems automate competitive intelligence, turn messy customer data into insights, and compress weeks of analysis into hours with LLM workflows. I've also built a couple of side projects with Claude Code.
Since xxx sits right at the AI and contingent work intersection, I'm curious how you're thinking about using automation internally as you scale?
I'm very intrigued by the xxx role. Would love to talk about the role and why I would be a fit.
- A VP that shares similar cultural background as myself. Still in the process of interviewing now.
Hi xxx,
Online applications are where intent goes to die, so I thought I'd reach out personally about the xxx role.
Background: ~10 years in strategy and innovation consulting (Fortune 100, JTBD/ODI), then product, incubation, and most recently market and competitive research for Verizon Connect, the $700M+ ARR fleet telematics business.
What got me to write was the JD. Reads like someone who actually builds wrote it. The loop I've been running for two years sounds close to what you're hiring for: find the analyst work that doesn't need a human, automate it with agentic tooling, reinvest the freed-up time in actual strategy. A couple examples:
- Multi-agent competitive scorecard system. Feed it a competitor set, it figures out the right subcategories, researches each one, ranks them, surfaces sources with confidence ratings. Built it on my laptop because Verizon's firewall blocked everything useful.
- LLM pipeline that turned thousands of unstructured sales notes, RFPs, and customer docs into 2,000+ categorized problem statements. Fed product roadmap and sales enablement directly.
- Agentic job search app I'm shipping right now in Claude Code. React/Vite/Tailwind, FastAPI/SQLite, Anthropic API with native web search. Real eval harness because the alternative is shipping garbage.
Honest gap: I haven't done deal-memo synthesis at a $10B AUM fund and I won't pretend to speak PM/CCO native. What I bring is a strategy operator who actually builds. I can ramp fast.
Would love to have a 30 min to pitch you on why I would be a great fit.
P.S. Saw the Russian poetry line in your bio. I grew up there.