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Cold email for jobs · 5+ years experience

Cold email is how senior people actually find jobs. We send 200 of them for you.

You upload your CV. We write a unique email to each of 200 hiring managers in your industry — referencing the company, your relevant experience, and a soft ask for a conversation. Replies arrive in one dashboard. 21% average reply rate (last 90 days, 8,400+ campaigns). From €19/month.

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A real generated email

Pulled from a real campaign. Company name redacted, candidate consented.

To: emma@█████████.dk
Subject: Senior Growth role at █████████

Hi Emma,

I’ve been following █████████’s expansion into the Nordic D2C space — saw the Series A close in March and the Copenhagen team double in the last two quarters.

I led growth at a similar-stage Berlin SaaS where we scaled CAC-payback from 14 months to 7 over 18 months, mostly through paid + lifecycle infrastructure. Happy to share the playbook that worked.

CV attached. Open to a 20-min intro next week if it’s a fit?

Best,
Lukas

Reply received 4 days later. Interview invite in the same thread. Lukas’s campaign produced 9 recruiter conversations from 200 emails.

21%
Average reply rate
10 days
Median time to first reply
200
Personalised emails per month
8,400+
Campaigns run

Last 90 days, anonymised across 8,400+ ShotgunCV campaigns. Updated weekly from production data.

Why senior people use cold email

Most great roles fill before they reach LinkedIn.

Posted jobs are the leftovers

Hiring managers fill roles in this order: someone they know → someone their team knows → someone who reached out directly → public posting. By the time a role lands on LinkedIn, the strongest candidates have usually already been considered. The longer you've been working, the more this matters — senior roles are filled even more quietly.

ATS filters work against experienced candidates

ATS keyword matching tends to filter out candidates whose CVs read as more senior than the job description. (You used ‘led a team of 12’ when the JD says ‘managed’? Filtered.) Cold email bypasses the ATS entirely. Your message lands in a real person’s inbox and gets evaluated by a human.

The number that matters is conversations, not applications

Twenty conversations with hiring managers beats 200 board applications, every time. Senior offers come from conversations — about fit, about scope, about whether a role can be expanded for the right person. ShotgunCV optimises for conversations: 200 cold emails typically produce 8-12 of them.

Why I built this

Marc Leon
Co-founder, ShotgunCV

I tried doing this manually for three months in 2025. I was spending two hours every weekday writing 4 cold emails — that’s about 80 emails a month. The reply rate was great but the volume was abysmal. I either had to stop applying or stop sleeping.

ShotgunCV is what I wished existed: the same hand-written quality, but at 200/month instead of 80, written for me. We built the AI generation layer so each email actually references the company, the quality-loop scoring so a templated email never ships, and the warmed-inbox infrastructure so deliverability stays above 95%. If it works for you the way it would have worked for me, you’re going to be fine.

Our Promise

Risk-free, both ways.

Free revisions. Cancel anytime.

If a sent email doesn't sound right, we rewrite it free — every plan, every time. And if you land a job tomorrow, cancel from your dashboard in one click. No contracts, no minimum periods, no surprise renewals.

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Common questions

Does cold email actually work for job hunting?
Better than most career advice will tell you. Senior hiring is overwhelmingly relationship-driven — most roles fill via direct outreach or referrals before anything is posted. The reason most candidates don't try cold email is simply effort: writing 200 personalised emails takes ~50 hours. ShotgunCV automates that work. Across 8,400+ campaigns we see a 21% reply rate, last 90 days.
Why hiring managers reply to cold emails (when they wouldn't reply to a job-board application)
Two reasons. First, cold email lands in their personal inbox, not in an ATS queue with 300 other applicants. Second, a well-written cold email proves you actually researched the company — which is exactly the signal hiring managers can't get from a generic ATS form. The bar is higher; the response rate is also higher.
What does a ShotgunCV cold email look like?
60-90 words. Subject line specific to the company. First sentence references something concrete about them — recent funding, a public roadmap signal, a product launch. Middle line connects one specific thing from your CV to what they likely need. Closes with a soft ask: a 20-minute intro call. Your CV is attached. Nothing templated, nothing generic.
How is this different from a service like LoopCV or LazyApply?
Those services apply to jobs that are already posted on LinkedIn, Indeed, and other boards. ShotgunCV cold-emails companies before they post — reaching the 70% of roles that never become public. See the full comparison at /vs/loopcv.
What if my industry doesn't take cold email seriously?
Some don't (academic research, government, very regulated industries). But almost every commercial industry does — tech, finance, marketing, sales, consulting, design, ops, and most senior roles in healthcare and pharma. Denmark's culture is particularly receptive (uopfordret ansøgning is a recognised norm). If you're unsure, our /jobs hub lists industries we have data on.
Will my emails go to spam?
Deliverability is our biggest technical investment. We send from warmed-up professional inboxes with proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Each email is paced and varied so a 200-letter campaign drips over 30 days from multiple inboxes — never a burst. Across 8,400+ campaigns, average inbox-placement rate is above 95%.