> Don't do that.

> Don't never ever EVER do that.

Why not? Is the world really going to implode because someone wants a job so badly that they slip a message into some random CEO’s inbox, an inbox that’s probably already flooded with irrelevant emails from strangers asking irrelevant things?

Don’t ever convince yourself that someone is so important you can’t email them. That’s a self-defeating mindset. Send the email and let them decide whether to ignore it, mark it as spam, block you, or whatever. Life goes on, and there are far more important things to worry about.

Oh, I get them all the time. Usually from junior engineers. I don't hold it against them - it's good advice.

So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped because a contract recruiter or internal recruiter is going through resumes at 6 a minute and looking for keywords nowhere near the job profile? What's your trick to get through the noise? Right now, it's brutal from junior to staff, and if your network isn't hiring there's no real way to tell the difference between someone who is taking care and someone spamming 200 applications and using 5 minutes of AI to customize. So other than "utilize the network you built over 25 years," what's your advice if all you have is "don't do that?"

I'm glad I have a job now. However, it's brutal for people on the hunt in bad situations or people who have been laid off.

There’s very little you can do wrong by sending someone a genuine email.

Now if you use AI to automate the personalization and start blasting it out indiscriminately, then yea, please don’t.

But if you are being genuine and hand writing emails expressing why you want to work for someone, it’s hard to screw it up.

> I've never gotten one in my entire career, and I was hiring manager in multiple companies/roles.

This may say more about how people interpret you, personally, than about the situation generally.

I've interviewed 3k people with Karat as a professional interviewer, and several hundred more as a hiring manager. The very few times I received direct emails from candidates attempting to circumvent the normal process were met with unequivocally negative reactions. First, I find the Internet sleuthing they'd undergo to find my email address a bit creepy – for example, Karat would only show the first name and profile pic for your interviewer. But more importantly, the sheer audacity to go for such a stunt would firmly anchor them in the box of people I'd never want to work with. I'd still be polite and professional to a fault, of course, but I'd never seriously consider them past that point.

Idk, that is terrible advice. I've known several people who got hired because they emailed the CEO of 5-20 person startups.

Heck my CEO asks me all the time that people are messaging him and if i think they are interesting enough to hire.