The best hiring request I have ever received

With the world becoming more accessible and open, virtually anyone can be contacted by anyone. Email IDs, contact details are easy to find out. Twitter handles are available to reach out. We all commit the innocent crime of accepting invites on LinkedIn, Facebooks without really knowing the person.

I don’t know this person but there are some mutual friends, so no harm in accepting.

I must admit I don’t seem to recollect or know half the people on my LinkedIn list. When facebook sends me a birthday reminder, I wonder who this person is and why does he/she sit on my list? I may have added the person when I desperately wanted to increase my friend list, but I don’t think he/she is a friend. All this has also brought in the problem of people bombarding you with irrelevant communication or reaching out for some help/support without setting much context for you.

At the cost of sounding arrogant, I am beginning to feel time crunched when I get 10–20 such referral requests a week, asking if I could refer them to Amazon, Paytm. Some people want to know Amazon culture, some want to know interview process and some just write in asking me what I think of the recent Supreme court judgement. Like really? I am not an HR, this is not my primary job. I always feel time crunched and do not get time to finish that book I have been reading, where do I take time out to give all the knowledge to you? Typically I have also seen some people congratulate me for my books and then their very next communication is with a CV. I had written an article some time back on how not to ask for a referral.

This one is about something different though. This one is about how a referral request I received today that made me think if I could go out of my way and hire this person in my own team. And so, this article is how to ask for a referral :)

Catchy subject: I saw an email sitting in my personal email. Its subject caught my eye. It said ‘Why am I excited to work for Amazon?’. The subject seemed interesting enough for me to open up this email first among all the other emails sitting there, asking me to pay my bills, selling me loans and what not.

A brief introduction about the person telling me what stands out in him: The person started the email, setting context on how he had read some of my medium articles and a relevant article made him write to me. Next he gave his work’s introduction but in a very interesting and honest manner. unfortunate mismatch of key ideologies with my co-founder…It is hard to write about failures, especially in your introduction and this person did that well. His intro also gave me an indication of why I should think of hiring him.

His interest in Amazon: This section was the icing on the cake. The person connected the dots of how his past work fitted with Amazon, what excited him about Amazon and what does he bring to the table for an Amazon recruiter. He also mentioned how the culture of the company was in-line with his own working styles. So the focus was as much on the hard skills as the principles of working. He even saw how my own team could benefit from hiring him, which to me must have needed a lot of homework to do.

As the world becomes more open, the attention spans are becoming shorter and random emails act more as distractions for all of us, with us ignoring these flood of requests coming our way. This to me was by far, one of the best referral requests I had received ever.

The email was very personalized, written interestingly with a proper structure. The content showed a lot of research and homework done before randomly shooting an email out. While currently there is no opening in my team, I am gonna keep this CV bookmarked.

I have already sent it out to some other recruiters and given some tips to the person on how to go about it as next steps :)

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