LinkedIn outreach template for hiring

“How do I hire employee #1, 5, or 10?”

Every early-stage founder, all the time.

At Twain, we’re 11 full-time employees.

Including myself, only five of us came through our direct network.

Everyone else?

Through cold outreach on LinkedIn.

This means we hired more than 50% of our world-class talent through cold outreach.

No recruiters, no ads, not even job descriptions.

I like to compare earliest stage hiring with outbound led sales.

It helps to realize something important early on.

No one knows about you or your startup, they don’t know about the benefits of working with you and they don’t know if it's the right opportunity for them.

It’s the founder's job to find, vet, and convince A-class talent.

Not so different from outbound led sales, right?

Here’s the template that helped us convince world-class talent to take meetings with us and eventually join our mission: to help everyone in the world be heard and understood.

Building blocks:

[RHETORICAL QUESTION], [SOFT CTA], [ONE SENTENCE COMPANY DESCRIPTION], [BENEFIT 1],[BENEFIT 2],[BENEFIT 3],[BENEFIT 4], [CTA]

Example lead engineer:

“Hi NAME, ever imagined building a product with the potential to touch a billion peoples’ lives? Lead engineering at Twain. We develop AI that helps users to communicate clearly & confidently. Remote first, stocks, top-of-the-market pay, and a world-class team await you. Open to chat? Best, Mo :)”

Let’s look at the message sentence by sentence, to understand our motivation behind it.

“Hi NAME, ever imagined building a product with the potential to touch a billion peoples’ lives?”

The idea behind it? Your opener is your only chance to pique someone's interest, and boost their imagination. You want to attract people who dream big. It’s a filter because the first employees are often very entrepreneurial.

“Lead engineering at Twain.”

Answer the purpose behind your outreach right away. Keep it as short and as clear as possible.

“We develop AI that helps users to communicate clearly & confidently.”

Answering what the company is about. Again, try to keep it as short as possible. If you manage to grab their attention, they will do some research and figure out what your company is about. If there is no information, they will ask you. Your outreach message must focus on them.

“Remote first, stocks, top-of-the-market pay, and a world-class team await you.”

What do smart people care about in 2022? Right. Fair pay, equity, remote first and working with very very smart people. It’s really that simple.

“Open to chat? Best, Mo :)”

Super short call-to-action. Could be longer but 300 characters is all we have people, so let’s use them on what really matters. The candidate.

Some numbers which highlight how candidate focused your outreach needs to be:

198 Characters about the candidate

68 Characters about Twain

25 Character CTA

Bonus:

Sometimes candidates accept the request but don’t answer the message. Here is the follow-up we send:

“Hi NAME, here are some resources to better evaluate if Twain can be a great fit for you:

• Find our approach to salaries here
• Learn more about our values here
• Read about our founding story here

Does this generally pique your interest?”

Again, we fully focus on what they care about.

You are now equipped to craft your own hiring outreach template for LinkedIn :)

Additionally, you can use Twain to analyze your messages for potential improvements.

It's free.

Simply go to www.usetwain.com