Personalising a message does not mean complimenting someone. It means showing, in one sentence, that you understood what they do and why this job relates to it.
Evidence beats praise
| Praise | Evidence |
|---|---|
| "Your impressive background caught my eye" | "You've spent three years on billing systems — this job is the same problem at about ten times the volume" |
| "I loved your recent post" | "Your write-up on moving off a monolith is close to what this team starts in January" |
| "You'd be a great fit" | "You moved from agency to in-house two years ago. This is the next step up from where that took you" |
The right column does something the left cannot: it gives the person a reason to believe the job might actually be relevant. That is the entire job of a first message.
Find four things before you write a word
Personalising at scale is a research problem before it is a writing problem. From each profile, get:
- What they specifically work on — not their title, the substance.
- Which direction they are going — what their last two moves had in common.
- One concrete detail you can quote — a project, a scale, a move, something public.
- The honest reason this job is a step up for them.
If you cannot fill in the fourth one, do not send the message. Someone you cannot build a reason for is someone you should not be contacting — and it is cheaper to notice now than after they reply asking why you got in touch.
Getting AI to vary the substance, not the adjectives
The failure mode of AI-written outreach is fifty messages that all say "your impressive work in X" with X swapped. The structure and substance never change.
What works:
- Give it the four facts, not the whole profile. Then it has to build the message around them.
- Ban the vocabulary. No superlatives. No "impressive", "excited", "passionate", "reached out", "came across".
- Set a hard length. Under 90 words. Length is where padding hides.
- Require the why-you sentence to use one of the facts you supplied.
- Forbid invention explicitly. Use only these facts. If something is missing, leave it out rather than filling it in.
Check every message before it goes
Seven questions, fifteen seconds:
- Can every fact about the person be traced to their profile?
- Is the job you describe them doing their current job?
- Does the first sentence mention them rather than you?
- Is there one detail that could not apply to anyone else?
- Under 90 words?
- Is the ask small — a question, not a meeting request?
- Would you be comfortable if they replied "where did you get this?"
Download the sequence template and checklist · all templates
The mistake that does real damage
Given an out-of-date profile, AI will congratulate someone on a job they left last year, or praise a project belonging to someone else.
Unlike a boring message, an invented detail does not just fail. It tells the person that nobody read anything and that the sender was willing to pretend otherwise. Check every fact against a live profile, not a search result.