URGENT...piss poor networking response rate
I've been really ramping up networking this summer but my response rate is absolutely terrible - like maybe 0.5% (like 2 responses per 100 emails sent). At first I thought it was my emails or approach, but I'm starting to wonder if the real issue is that I'm just not actually reaching people in the first place.
I've seen debates on here about whether you should attach your resume in the first email or not. Some people say it makes you look too transactional, but others argue you need to show your credentials upfront. The thing that really gets me is apparently a lot of banks automatically flag emails with attachments from unknown addresses as spam. Is this true? I just don't know if the problem is that bankers just aren't replying to me. But I'm starting to think that maybe the problem is I'm not reaching them in the first place at all.
LinkedIn has been pretty much useless too. Most bankers either don't have detailed profiles or just never check their messages so it seems. I tried this site also but it kinda sucks, and the data isn't very accurate.
I'm just wondering - maybe my "low response rate" isn't actually about my networking skills at all. I feel like I have good networking skills. Maybe I'm just not reaching the right people effectively in the first place. Like if my emails are going to spam folders and LinkedIn messages are going unread, then of course I'm not getting responses.
Is this really the best way to network? Am I missing something? Or is this just a trend with email algorithms or something?
2/100 is not 0.5% buddy. You might wanna ditch the IB dream and go Big 4 given ur quantitative skills
Not very deloitteful
Del
a good way that u can gauge your open hit-rate is by downloading an email tracker from the chrome webstore. tells you when they open and how many times they re-open it. then u can gauge whether to follow-up or not, etc... also might be subjective - but I always attach my resume + a work sample. has def come in handy a few times where they mention it in the acc chat.
great news ur doing 4 times better then you think you are!!! (2/100 = 2%)
only bank ive heard of that has any kind of firewall type thing is SMBC everyone else should be easily reachable from a .edu address
You are kind of starting real early though, the bankers you want to talk to are busy herding the interns they already have not thinking about the class 2 years out - try more in september ish (or even later imo)
also 100% attach ur resume im not answering anything from a kid I know 0 things about without being able to skim their info
gl bro
My edu email has certainly gotten bounce backs, and I assume those are firewall type things. Are you sure that's not a thing? Thanks so much for the positive vibes!
if it bounces u just have the wrong email address thats an outlook thing - any firewall is internal once the email is received if it bounced theres just not an email account with that address
I agree you are starting too early. Follow up on these emails again with your resume in September. Good luck!
Have heard a lot of people do the mass blasts / cold outreaches and think this should be the last option. Would also say having received cold emails from time to time I have more times than not found some sort of error (wrong name, wrong firm name, wrong group etc) or font mismatch (eg when they get my name right it’s a different font size or style vs rest of letter) which typically results in my not being inclined to reply as it’s a minor thing to get right and there are a lot of people looking for seats. I also get misdirects ie we would have a deep campus team for school Y and I went to school X and being told they didn’t know when I do reply (despite that Y team doing multiple on campus onsites). Groundwork.
Would encourage you to double check emails as they go out. I do believe you can increase your hit rate by being more targeted by hitting core or non-core recruiting team members, on campus recruiters who can plug you into those teams if you cannot find, recent school alum, someone with shared hobbies or background who can be an advocate. It’s not easy but it does end up being more targeted and you should get more engagement.
Intern classes are getting more competitive and the list of core schools is expanding. At this point, other banks may be different but for us, maybe 5% of our intern class is outside our core schools.
Just speaking personally but there's only so many people I can talk to. If you have a good but not stellar resume (say a 3.6 from Boston University), I know there is no chance in hell I'm getting you an interview no matter how awesome of a person you are so I'd rather focus my time speaking with people who I think have a chance (say the double engineering / finance major from Penn State or University of Wisconsin Madison with a 3.95 that's also an athlete).
If you fit into the good but not phenomenal bucket, focus on warm intros isntead of cold emails. Recent alumni, club/fraternity/sports team connections, upperclassmen, anyone who comes to your campus, etc.,
They'll give you better advice specific to your school and be more likely to respond. Focus on smaller banks, middle markets, regionals, etc., who may get less volume. Focus on adjacent jobs (corporate finance, straetgy, corporate development roles).
If you want the job, you'll get there eventually but it might not be your first job out of college, nor does it need to be.
5% of interns outside of core schools sounds really low. How many core schools does your bank have?
I know cold email better than 99.9% of people on the planet. You are absolutely destroying your email reputation doing hundreds of cold emails. The cold outreach game has become the biggest slog of anything in sales and marketing as of last year. This isn't 2009 where you can fire off 1k emails and get 500 responses. Google and Microsoft have gone to war with email spammers and unless you know what you're doing, it's going to be dog shit.
I've spent years in tech and financial sales and cold email was my main tool for getting deals done when I didn't have a network. With that being said, my "best practices" document is almost 5 pages long at this point. Instead of doing all of that, just stick to LinkedIn before that gets nerfed too.
If you're doing cold email here's some basics of what's in my doc:
As you can tell, this is specific to a business doing cold outreach and I'm not gonna go edit everything so it's fit for personal networking but hopefully you get some nuggets.
Super helpful. How did you learn all of this? Also would be curious to hear how deep this "best practices" document goes
Like I said it's just been years of me using the cold email strategy to source business and sell. It's a mixture of personal testing and successes/failures which I've iterated on as well as sales training, listening to experts, and the likes. The whole doc can be summed up in:
I'll say that knowing how to sell stuff online with cold email may be the best ROI known to man if you do it correctly and follow all the steps because all it costs you is domains, SMTP subscriptions (Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook), and sequencing tech stack (think Apollo, Instantly, Smartlead). Unfortunately, it's not very sexy at all so most of WSO overlooks things like this which actually bring in millions if done right.
The rest of the best practices are just details and amplifiers after you've already gotten the fundamentals down. Tech stack is very important right now too.
I think that's why a lot of growth for businesses has come in the form of marketing recently because it's more acceptable and easier but comes with a higher monetary cost and lower ROI. For example, a good ROAS is like 2-3x maybe?? Someone can check me on this but cold email ROI can be 10x+ and I've seen it happen. I use LinkedIn outreach 75% of the time right now and it works really well for setting up sales calls.
A lot of good advice here, when I was recruiting I sent 100 cold emails a day from a non target state school from Oct to end of January. Response rate was a similar 2%, but it’s a numbers game. I still had 10 coffee chats a week because I sent 500 emails a week. Landed an NYC MM IB Offer @ JEF/CITI/GUG
Be hot. Opens the most important doors in life. Skilling up and pedigree are for losers
its all about finding a connection with them in some way. you should have a larger network than you think and be overly nice to them and thank them for their time
Stop attaching the resume. I'm not saying it turns most people off (most wont' care whether you attach it or not). And I'm not saying it triggers the spam filter, because it probably doesn't in most cases.
But I don't think its beneficial. It does come off as transactional or socially aggressive to some people. There's no rational reason to help someone in recruiting (a zero-sum game) without some human connection. Turning the interaction into a cookie-cutter inhuman interaction will kill that human connection. And you may trigger the occasional spam filter. These drawbacks may be small, but even smaller is the number of bankers who are like "oh man this resume changed everything, now we need this kid."
Speaking as one person, if I get an email with a resume, I don't mind that it's there but I'm definitely not opening it. I'm reading the text of the email to see if anything stands out.
I 100% agree. Always wait until some sort of connection has been formed before attaching the item that will actually be useful for referral purposes.
For the record, I haven’t responded to a single email outreach so far this year from students, and if other people are nearly as busy as I am, it’s probably similar for them. It’s not you.
The #1 factor in whether or not I respond to any type of outreach (~80%) is how busy I am. If I have time: I will respond (and have responded) to literally anybody. I can’t stress enough, I’ll set up call with a 2.1 GPA freshman art major in community college if I got a workout and 6+ hours of sleep the night before, and expect to repeat the same tonight. But if I’m having to sleep 5 hours and skip a workout or two, you best bet I’m using any free minute to take care of myself.
The second most important factor (15%) is if I have something in common with you. Same school, same hometown, same hard major, same dogshit gpa, hell I’ll be completely transparent and say same ethnicity (I’m a minority).
The third most important factor (5%) is how impressive your resume is.
Right now people are just too busy working on deals (not to be confused with closing deals) to respond.
alongside the content advice other people have given, i think you may be jumping the gun if you're doing cold outreach as a rising soph. every bank is busy w holding intern hands and now doubly so as incoming analyst class onboards. it comes off as giga hardo if you're trying to spam bankers now, especially if multiple in the same group get it
Any advice on cold emailing for FT? Don’t want to spam the whole group, but also want to make sure I have a contact in every bank/group I’m interested in. How do you find the balance between being respectful and persistent?
stop whining on wso and get to grinding. who care's if response rate is low. I think I sent out around 10,000+ emails and had like less than 100 responses so just deal with it and get back to work.
Some of y’all are overthinking the cold email part. If you’re blasting out 100+ a week, you better have some infra behind it. Set up your deliverability first, warm up your domain, and test your inboxes. Sendr from AppSumo helps streamline that if you're solo, way easier than duct-taping stuff together. Otherwise yeah, you’ll just keep nuking your sender score.
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