I want to pick up on something I touched on in my email last night.

A designer I worked with recently had a 35% response rate on his warm outreach.

Hiring managers were replying to him.

He was not getting interviews.

That gap confused him. He was doing the thing people told him to do. Warm outreach. Direct messages. Not just applying cold.

And it was working in the sense that people were replying.

But nothing was moving forward.

When I looked at the messages he was sending, the problem was immediately obvious.

Every message was about him.

I have this many years of experience. I saw your role. Here are three reasons I am a good fit. Looking forward to connecting.

All I. No you.

Here is what I know from being on the other side of this.

When I was a hiring manager and a role was open, I would get dozens of these a day. Sometimes more.

Almost all of them got redirected to the job board.

Not because the people weren't talented.

Because they had not given me a single reason to treat them differently from everyone else who sent the same message.

The ones I actually replied to were different.

They weren't asking for anything.

They had noticed something specific about my career, my company, or my work. A move I had made. Something I had written. A direction the company was going that they had a genuine perspective on.

Something that told me this person had paid attention.

That sounds small. It is not.

Think about this honestly.

The people closest to you, your colleagues, your manager, sometimes even the people at home, are not genuinely curious about your work and your career choices in the way a stranger who reached out specifically to understand them would be.

When that happens it means something.

It creates a reason to reply that has nothing to do with whether you are hiring.

That is the shift.

The goal of the first outreach message is not to get an interview.

The goal is to get a reply.

The interview is several steps further down a path that starts with genuine curiosity and builds into trust.

I had a client who was getting into conversations with hiring managers at companies that had no open roles.

Three months later two of those companies reached out to him with roles that had not been posted publicly yet.

He was already in the conversation.

That is what happens when you stop leading with what you want and start leading with genuine interest in the other person.

The template everyone is using right now came from the same internet.

It worked five years ago when warm outreach was novel.

Now every hiring manager has seen it five hundred times.

The signal is drowned in the noise.

The only way to be the signal is to say something nobody else is saying.

Which starts with actually caring about who you are talking to.

Reply and tell me what your current response rate looks like. Even if it is zero. I want to know what you are working with.

Joseph

P.S. I will be working closely with a small group of designers for the June intake inside The Backdoor.

Full details are here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mci8w5E9so_a5hjT1zIqjYM6W5EKfUooGmWtaUJLe_0/preview

If this feels like the help you need, reply “I’m in” and I’ll send you the enrollment details.