Hey hey, thanks for participating! Your questions:
General take: Pitching (along with all kinds of cold messages) is probably underrated, but I think it takes careful thought and hard work to get right.
Make it work by: Understanding your target very well and saying legible things about the value you can add.
Mistake: Being overconfident!
Low confidence tip (would be curious if others disagree): At bigger organizations, it might be more effective to pitch program/research staff instead of recruiting staff. The former group is more likely to have insight into poorly formed staffing needs that haven’t yet developed into full hiring rounds.
Additional loose thoughts:
I can’t speak for all organizations (seriously! this is something I’d expect to wildly vary across org type and size), but at my organization (GiveWell) it’s currently unlikely that any cold pitch for full-time employment or a contract would be successful. I receive lots of pitches, and I typically ignore or decline them. That’s because at our current size and level of specialization:
We think pretty carefully about headcount planning and post any full-time hiring needs quickly. If we don’t have a role posted on our job board, the most likely reasons for that role’s absence are (1) we just don’t have the hiring need or (2) we aren’t interested in accepting applications from the public.
Volunteers and contractors have very high management and training overhead relative to the value they produce.
External people are unlikely to have a good grasp of our highest-priority needs.
I can imagine a cold pitch that would be useful, but it would need to be related to a hiring need that met some of these criteria: (1) it’s pretty complex and hard to describe legibly to external folks, (2) it requires very high context on our work and we think it would be difficult to find the right person with an external search, (3) Neither of the previous conditions apply, but we just don’t have time to design a job application process at the moment.
The biggest mistake I think pitchers make is being very confident about their ability to provide value without really understanding the organization they’re pitching—that’s a big turnoff! Fwiw, this is a failure mode for all kinds of cold messages.
This message is very light on advice for making pitching work (sorry), but that’s only because I haven’t experienced many successful pitches. I hope these thoughts were useful, and good luck!
Hey hey, thanks for participating! Your questions:
General take: Pitching (along with all kinds of cold messages) is probably underrated, but I think it takes careful thought and hard work to get right.
Make it work by: Understanding your target very well and saying legible things about the value you can add.
Mistake: Being overconfident!
Low confidence tip (would be curious if others disagree): At bigger organizations, it might be more effective to pitch program/research staff instead of recruiting staff. The former group is more likely to have insight into poorly formed staffing needs that haven’t yet developed into full hiring rounds.
Additional loose thoughts:
I can’t speak for all organizations (seriously! this is something I’d expect to wildly vary across org type and size), but at my organization (GiveWell) it’s currently unlikely that any cold pitch for full-time employment or a contract would be successful. I receive lots of pitches, and I typically ignore or decline them. That’s because at our current size and level of specialization:
We think pretty carefully about headcount planning and post any full-time hiring needs quickly. If we don’t have a role posted on our job board, the most likely reasons for that role’s absence are (1) we just don’t have the hiring need or (2) we aren’t interested in accepting applications from the public.
Volunteers and contractors have very high management and training overhead relative to the value they produce.
External people are unlikely to have a good grasp of our highest-priority needs.
I can imagine a cold pitch that would be useful, but it would need to be related to a hiring need that met some of these criteria: (1) it’s pretty complex and hard to describe legibly to external folks, (2) it requires very high context on our work and we think it would be difficult to find the right person with an external search, (3) Neither of the previous conditions apply, but we just don’t have time to design a job application process at the moment.
The biggest mistake I think pitchers make is being very confident about their ability to provide value without really understanding the organization they’re pitching—that’s a big turnoff! Fwiw, this is a failure mode for all kinds of cold messages.
This message is very light on advice for making pitching work (sorry), but that’s only because I haven’t experienced many successful pitches. I hope these thoughts were useful, and good luck!