There are a few firms I am looking to hit up in the city for a potential summer internship... however after crafting my standard email template, I am wondering how you would go abouts adding a "personal" touch to the outreach email. Should I maybe mention a fact about the firm I like and why that makes me interested in pursuing any sort of summer opportunity?
Any sort of advice to make this outreach process a little less vanilla would be great.
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If it's a first contact, I'm pretty sure the only thing that matters is brevity. The point of the first email is to establish the connection/set up a phone call etc. I personally wouldn't bother with the personal touch just yet
While brevity is important to keep in mind I beg to differ that you shouldn't add any personal touch yet. It takes one sentence to say how you found the firm, what you like about it, etc.
If they are a MM firm it takes few words to say, "I found your firm because I am very interested in working for a middle market firm in New York, which seems to be your specialty."
Totally get that man, but from my experiences I got the most responses out of the shortest messages I sent. I'm all about leaving your own touch- it's what will differentiate you from every other candidate- but I think the first point of contact doesn't need to be about why you are interested in the firm. It should just be to connect with the person in question and I believe that's where you convince them that their firm is the one that's right for you. Just my two cents on that based on the past year of networking I successfully leveraged.
Your argument makes a lot of sense, too. I guess this is where it comes down this being an art not a science. Out of curiosity, how long are your intro messages typically? I just looked back at some I sent this spring/summer and they all are about 7-8 sentences (~140-180 words). I remember when I first started sending messages they were definitely much longer, but I don't think I have really noticed any difference in response rates. How long are your messages typically?
I was in the same boat, I used to write really long emails but I started using the format "name, school/major, current internship or most relevant recent experience, and ask for phone call stating my objective to attain an SA or FT position very directly". Honestly they were on average 3-4 sentences and for the most part I noticed that being concise was MUCH better than bs'ing them on why I thought they were special.
Okay that's interesting. I'm going to try to look back and see if I can find a difference in response rates when I changed to my shorter format. And also maybe try to shorten it even more if I find a difference. I think that I have had a relatively high response rate both ways, but always open for improvements.
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