I wish I had this when I got laid off

Months ago, I got laid off from my first job after moving to Sydney.

It was undeniably tough. Cold resume applications were no longer effective, providing zero ROI. Crazy, I know. Success nowadays really required a referral.

Luckily for me, I landed the perfect role after only 20 applications.

But what if that role never existed? I could easily have faced sending out 100 more applications just to get a single interview. Without enough connections here in Sydney, I would’ve also had to send 100 LinkedIn DMs to hiring managers to secure those referrals.

Lucky for you, past self, I found the perfect tool to do this AT SCALE.

Without the Tool

If you don’t have any connections to the companies you are applying for, the usual advice is to message hiring managers directly on LinkedIn.

Here’s what that process looks like, step-by-step:

1. Buy LinkedIn Premium (yes, this is required to send cold DMs).

2. Look for open roles on LinkedIn Jobs.

3. Find the hiring manager using LinkedIn Search (more details in this blog post).

4. Connect with them, attaching a personalized message explaining why you want to connect.

As you can see, it is quite a tedious process, especially if you’re doing this 100 times. Luckily, steps 3 and 4 can be fully automated!

With the Tool

The tool we’re going to use is PhantomBuster—one of the leading tools for automating LinkedIn workflows. Originally designed for finding leads, it can definitely be repurposed for finding hiring managers.

Now, go and sign up for a free trial, and use PhantomBuster’s ready-made workflow called “LinkedInSearch to LinkedIn Connection”.

In this workflow, you need to allow PhantomBuster’s scraper access to your LinkedIn account. Pro tip, their Chrome extension makes it easy to connect your LinkedIn account to PhantomBuster—so make sure to use it.

Then it prompts you to input which profiles you want to connect with. In our case, we simply want to input our LinkedIn search query and paste it into the tool.

For instance, here’s my search query if I want to search for all of Atlassian’s hiring managers located in Sydney.

The final step is writing your custom message. This template will be used for all the connection requests messages that will be sent out.

But there’s a major problem. The message isn’t fully personalized if we do it this way. We want our message to differ from person to person. For instance, we want to be able to find common interests or skill sets between ourselves and the hiring manager, and mention them in our short message.

With the “Enhanced” Tool

Okay, let’s fix the above problem. Let’s use two separate workflows provided by PhantomBuster: one for searching our hiring managers, and another for creating the personalized messages.

First, look for the ready-made “LinkedIn Search Export” workflow and use it. Again, it will ask you to connect to your LinkedIn account and paste your LinkedIn search query.

After that, you can proceed to launch the workflow. Once it finishes scraping, it will redirect you to the results page.

Congrats, you now have a list of LinkedIn profiles!

Now, look for this “AI LinkedIn Message Writer” workflow and use it.

The first step is to input the LinkedIn profiles you want to connect with. Since you used the “LinkedIn Search Export” workflow, you should now have access to the database of LinkedIn profiles that were recently scraped.

The second step is writing the prompt. Since PhantomBuster doesn’t provide a sandbox environment for testing, you'll need to experiment with this. I suggest you tweak your prompt in ChatGPT, as the default model used here is GPT-3.5.

You can also view the full prompt I came up with. It should be a good starting point for you, so feel free to copy it.

# Role
You are a professional assistant specialized in writing LinkedIn connection request messages.

# Task
Write a super short LinkedIn connection request message to a hiring manager asking for a quick chat with the intention of connecting and eventually asking for a referral. Look for similar skill sets or work experiences between me and the hiring manager and mention them in the message. If there are no commonalities, you can write a generic connection request message saying you are interested in applying for the role.

# Context
My work experience and skill sets you should match with the hiring managers are the following.
- **Name**: Adel Mandanas
- **Current Position**: Senior Software Engineer at Dovetail
- **Skills**: Go, Sentry, AWS, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, PHP, React, Kubernetes, Terraform, Datadog, Docker
- **Experience**: 
  - **Bukalapak**: Revamping observability and spearheading ledger integration of e-wallet services.
  - **Xendit**: Leading Direct Debit product expansion and building scalable systems.
  - **Freelancer.com**: Implementing verification systems and improving facial matching tools.
  - **Projects**: Developing an online platform for visualizing coastal plastic waste and co-founding a university events mobile app.
- **Awards**: Global Nominee at NASA International Space Apps Challenge, 3rd Place at Freelancer.com Hackathon
- **Education**: B.S. Computer Science, University of the Philippines Diliman, US GPA (converted): 4.0

I also did a bit of testing with this prompt, and it came up with the following message for one of my prospects:

After finalizing your prompt, you can pretty much launch this workflow!

And voilà! You’re done! That’s all it takes to fully automate your LinkedIn job hunting workflow.

What’s the Catch?

I think PhantomBuster is amazing! It’s an incredible tool, especially considering there’s NO public LinkedIn API for connecting with prospects and sending them cold DMs. Imagine being able to search for hiring managers on LinkedIn and reach out to all of them effortlessly. All in under 30 seconds.

However, there are a few caveats to using this workflow. Remember, PhantomBuster was originally designed for finding leads. It’s primarily a B2B tool, so the cost might be a bit steep.

They offer a 14-day free trial, which could be sufficient for some, but not during this tech winter. While the $56 per month pricing isn’t unreasonable, it can be a bit much if you’re currently without a job.

But don’t worry, in next week’s blog, I will show you how to build this job hunting tool with zero code and zero cost (but with some obvious trade-offs).

That’s all for this week…but one more thing. If you’re enjoying this, can you do me a favor and forward it to a friend? Thanks.