How to write a recruiter email engineers will actually answer

Brought to you by SadServers  – Hands-On Linux & DevOps; Real Challenges. Real Infra. Real Skills.

(No AI tokens were spent in the creation of this post).

I used to get a lot of emails from recruiters for Infra/Cloud/DevOps/SRE positions and it always amazed me that almost none of them were really good. And I get it, it’s hard to recruit for a company that is not well-known, or doesn’t offer a good salary, or doesn’t have interesting technical challenges, or all of the above.

The ideal recruiting email for a technical candidate should have these elements:

• An introduction that is not a template or obviously mass-produced. If there’s an indication that the recruiter actually read your LinkedIn profile that’s a plus and also a bit of ego stroking won’t hurt.
• The name of the company hiring, what it does and a link to it. Many third-party recruiters just won’t say what the company is so you don’t apply directly, and/or want you on a “quick call”. No thanks.
• Skip the mission and vision of the company and over-selling it; we don’t really care unless it is solving world hunger or close to it.
• A summary of what the role is. A link to the full job description saves time.
• A description of the tech stack and main tooling doesn’t take a lot of space and conveys quite a bit of info in terms of wanting/not wanting to work with that stack.
• Expectations or examples of work for this role are really nice to have. When I see a section about things the candidate will be doing in one, three or six months, I see a good signal that they thought about the role and onboarding.
• Related to the tech stack and expectations, mentioning specific technical challenges is very good, especially if it involves scale and other things that get us DevOps people excited. A link to the company’s engineering page or blog is great.
• Location: Specify clearly if the job is fully in-office, fully remote or hybrid and where remote is allowed. Too often a job ad says remote but then it means two days in the office or remote only within the country.
• Compensation. Clear salary range and other benefits. Also mention vacation time.
• A description of the interview process. It doesn’t have to be exhaustive (that can be discussed at a later phase) but we want to know if we are having three remote interviews or eight in-person ones (yes, I’ve had eight interviews) and their types.
• A clear call to action that isn’t necessarily “hop on a call”, but can be followed with an email with more details. Bait-and-switch from recruiters wanting you to get on a call to tell you salary, or “to get to know you” (ie, fill out a form about you for their records) is never good. I didn’t take those calls if salary wasn’t already in the email and the few times I broke that rule, I regretted it. If the salary were good, they would have led with it.