[guessmyname]

> Don't do that.

> Don't never ever EVER do that.

Why not? Is the world really going to implode because someone wants a job so badly that they slip a message into some random CEO’s inbox, an inbox that’s probably already flooded with irrelevant emails from strangers asking irrelevant things?

Don’t ever convince yourself that someone is so important you can’t email them. That’s a self-defeating mindset. Send the email and let them decide whether to ignore it, mark it as spam, block you, or whatever. Life goes on, and there are far more important things to worry about.

[antonymoose]

A judicious email to the hiring manager? Sure, why not roll the dice.

We’ve had candidates spam our every Senior+ level staff at my current job (many not even in the relevant department) trying to get their resume boosted.

Those went from candidate to rejects very quickly.

[johnnyanmac]

Never spam a company, I agree. If you're going to "circumvent", pick one or two (and honestly, even 2 is pushing it) contacts you know the most and email them. And make sure they are at least related to the department you're going into unless it's an director/executive person (I'm not much more effective in getting someone a sales role as you would be going to the online portal). Anymore than that and you won't be seen any differently from a spam caller.

The goal is to personalize, not spray and pray all at one company.

[antonymoose]

If these candidates had some type of meaningful reach-out I would at least give them the time of day - but if you send me and 15 colleagues a generic, templates email in just comes off as lazy and a waste of our time. Considering our head of HR has to draft a memo on how to handle such candidates it truly morphed into a non-trivial situation for the firm.

[nemomarx]

I guess the risk is that if the CEO doesn't like getting bothered and remembers your name, it might hurt your chances being hired in other ways?

[janalsncm]

In that case it seems there is good upside and minimal downside. The upside is high chance of getting an interview. The downside is reducing your already very low baseline probability closer to zero.

This is a lot of words to say: you have nothing to lose by doing this.

[pavlus]

Would you like to work for a company, where CEO is busy reprimanding people looking for a job, instead of doing his actual job, anyway?

[skeptic_ai]

If ceo receives 1000 resumes per month will it even matter?

Imagine as a ceo you receive emails from juniors wanting to work for your company. You might not even know the role, why would you waste time checking these Cv/email that detracts you from your goals? Usually are low quality and spammy , any ceo will quickly learn to ignore or forward to hr to blacklist these people. These are the same people that once they get a job will email the ceo for a raise.

As a ceo you hire hr to deal with that noise and only give you the top 3 are hr and others wasted their time filtering. If ceo does the filtering is useless.

Imagine for a tech role: the good devs would never email the CEO, the crap and entitles one will do. It’s definitively the kind of candidates you want to avoid.

[drillsteps5]

I honestly don't know if it was sarcasm or if you were serious.

At any rate, the downside of this is as follows.

The goal of having Human Resources, talent acquisition, recruiters, and other similar roles is to let hiring managers (and everyone above them, up and including the CEO) concentrate on doing their job and only assist the aforementioned roles in hiring. Of course hiring manager is ultimately responsible for hiring a good candidate but they are not expected to do things like posting job descriptions, initial screening, background checks, referral checks, employment history verification, dealing with legal stuff like NDAs etc etc, that's the job of HR/recruiters. Candidates reaching out to hiring managers (and especially higher ups) are not treated nicely by the HR as these candidates are attempting to take HR out of the picture.

HR are people and want to keep their job and get paid, and you circumventing them might be perceived as a threat to that.

That IN ADDITION to a disruption you will be causing hiring manager (or especially CEO) cause now they need to decide what to do with your email. Even though they have HR/recruiters to handle these things.

A typical result of such a "reach out" will likely be forwarding this email to HR and subsequent rejecting/blacklisting the candidate.

Edit: some clarifications

[janalsncm]

Blacklisting someone for sending a polite cold email to the CEO is bananas. No company worth working for will do this. Worst case is they will ignore you.