The Cold Open
First impressions and missed opportunities
Today, I got an email from a student at a prestigious university out east. The classic cold outreach: job referral request, neatly packed with professional accolades, educational background, and a dash of personal flair to keep it interesting. As someone who’s sent their fair share of these emails, I get it. That’s why it bothered me enough to draft this stream-of-consciousness essay.
There was clearly a template involved because the blanks meant for personalization were in bold–the email equivalent of seeing a CGI actor in one of those body suits covered in tiny motion-capture balls. It just makes the whole thing feel... artificial.
Surely, they sent this to tons of people at my company (wild guess). I know this because it was sent to my old email LDAP. For the uninitiated, LDAP stands for [checks Google] Lightweight Directory Access Protocol—a digital phonebook for your company’s internal systems.
I actually requested a vanity change shortly after starting at Block. My first assigned handle was first-initial-plus-last-name, which is cool, but didn’t quite have the right ring to it. So, I pulled a Timberlake and requested to drop the—or in this case, my first initial. Any email sent to my old handle still forwards to my new one. But I digress.
No shade to the person—kudos, actually, for doing the research. But I was expecting more. They did the work, but they didn’t sell me. I mean, they even figured out one of Block’s email LDAP naming conventions—but then fumbled the rest. Have I ever answered a cold email? Yes, but rarely. I’ve been in your shoes, young buck. I get you more than you know—but you gotta do it right.
Look, I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve sent cringe-worthy cold emails I’d rather pretend never existed. But the ones that worked? They weren’t perfect—they just made the person on the other end feel like a human, not an email template fill-in-the-blank.
In this case, the person asked about a role that wasn’t on my team, wasn’t a role I was hiring for, and wasn’t even remotely connected to what I do. And to top it off, they closed with (paraphrasing here): If this isn’t you, please forward it to the hiring manager :)
Okay… thanks?
I need to feel like you actually took the time to get to know me, friend. Come at me direct. An easy (yet not foolproof) opener could be:
Hey Alex, I don’t know you, but my name is… I’m studying [thing] at [fancy private university with ivy bushes n’ shit]…
I see you also went to [same college]… I see you worked at… Do you actually parler français like your LinkedIn says? Did you know so-and-so at such-and-such? You’re from Stockton too??
Not gonna lie, that last one would almost certainly get a response—even if it was just a call to say, Hello, congrats, you made it out of Stockton.
A part of me wanted to rewrite their cold outreach email for them and send it back so they could use it on their next wave.
This whole thing got me thinking: is cold outreach an art or a science?
I’ll probably need to figure that out.