Candidates discovered AI outbound, and make the same mistakes as recruiters
Candidates now mass-email founders with AI-personalized messages, and founders stopped reading them. Personalization is not specificity: what still gets a reply.
Candidates now write to founders in bulk, with an AI-"personalized" email. They're discovering what recruiters still haven't understood.
Nikunj, founder of Cutshort, says his inbox is filling up with these emails. Same opening line, same three bullet points, same "would love to connect." He used to read them. He doesn't anymore.
Brian Fink describes the mirror image on the recruiter side: a good engineer gets the same message, written by the same model, from ten agencies in the same week. And in a survey of more than 900 US HR professionals, 53% say they're annoyed by AI outreach that sounds robotic.
Same mistake on both sides: confusing personalization with specificity. Picking up the title, the company and three lines from the profile is a CV summary in paragraph form. It proves nothing.
What still gets a reply, according to Nikunj: a message sent to the 3 to 5 people actually hiring for the role, the week it opens, with a single concrete proof. A repo, a product, a number.
We see the same thing on our side. A generic InMail tops out at a 1 to 3% response rate. An email that cites a real project of the developer's goes above 30%. That's why the messages Azerit drafts always start from a specific project of the candidate, never from their profile.
Volume has become free. Relevance hasn't.
Candidate or recruiter, the only question that matters: what did you actually read about the other person before writing?
