Answering a Recruiter Who Contacted You
When a recruiter writes to you, the usual dynamic inverts: you don’t have to establish that you’re worth reading, because they’ve already decided that much. What you have to establish is whether the role is real and whether it’s for you.
So the reply isn’t a cover letter. It’s a short message that answers their question and asks two of your own — and the questions are the part most people skip.
Read the message first
Two very different things arrive in the same format.
A specific approach. It names the role, references something particular about your background, and reads as though a person looked at your profile. Sometimes it names the company.
A broadcast. Generic praise for your “impressive background,” a vague role description, a request to “hop on a quick call to discuss opportunities.” Sent widely.
The second isn’t bad faith — it’s how a lot of the trade works — but it deserves a shorter reply and a couple of questions before you invest anything. The tell is usually whether anything in the message could only have been written about you.
What to ask before you send a resume
Three questions, asked politely and early, save enormous amounts of time.
Which company, and is the role currently open? Some approaches are for a live vacancy with an approved budget. Others are pipeline-building against a role that might exist next quarter. Both are legitimate; only one is worth rearranging your week for.
Are you working directly with the hiring team? An agency with a direct relationship can tell you what the manager actually wants. One working from a job description at two removes cannot, and you’ll get the posting read aloud to you.
What’s the salary range? Ask. It’s a normal question, it’s increasingly published anyway, and discovering an incompatibility after three interviews is the single most common waste in a job search. Some recruiters won’t say; that answer is itself informative.
Asking these does not read as difficult. It reads as someone who has done this before.
Replying when you’re interested
Short, warm, one specific point of connection, and the questions. That’s the whole message.
Hi Marta — thanks for getting in touch, and yes, this is interesting. The consolidation work you mentioned is more or less what I spent last year on, so the fit is plausible.
Two things before I send anything over: which company is it, and is the role open now or are you building a pipeline? And if there’s a salary range, that would help me be useful about whether it’s worth both our time.
Free most afternoons this week if a call is easier.
Tomas
Under 120 words. No resume attached yet — send it after you know what you’re applying for, and after you know whether it needs framing for this particular role.
The one specific sentence at the top does matter. It confirms you read their message and gives them something to relay upward if they want to move fast.
Replying when you’re unsure
Say so. Ambiguity is a normal position and pretending to certainty in either direction is worse.
Hi — honestly not sure. I’m not actively looking and I’m happy where I am, but the domain is one I’d move for if the role were right. If you can tell me the company, the level, and roughly the range, I can give you a straight yes or no rather than a maybe.
This is a strong position and it’s not a tactic — it’s just true. A recruiter would much rather have a fast, honest maybe with conditions attached than a polite non-answer they have to chase.
Replying when you’re not looking
Reply anyway, in two lines. It costs fifteen seconds and it’s the highest-return message in this whole category.
Thanks Marta — not looking at the moment, but happy to be kept in mind for anything in regulated reporting later on. Two people on my old team are looking, if it’s useful for me to pass this along.
Recruiters keep records. The person who replied politely two years ago is the person they contact first when something better appears, and the offer to forward it costs you nothing while being genuinely useful to someone.
Silence is fine too and nobody is owed a reply. But this is the rare case where the courteous version has an obvious later payoff.
Where a written case still matters
There’s one point where you do write something letter-shaped: when the recruiter is going to submit you internally and asks for a note, or when they say “can you send me a couple of lines on why you’d be good for this.”
Give them something they can paste. Three or four sentences, one specific match, in language a non-specialist can relay accurately.
Three years owning the full reporting cycle at a company with no other analyst — collection, modelling, and the weekly meeting where someone disputes the number. The regional consolidation project is the closest match to what the role describes: three teams, three sets of numbers, one weekly view by the end of it. Coming from a smaller company, so full-cycle rather than deep in one slice.
That’s a compressed version of the evidence paragraph — see the four-paragraph letter for the long form. Written for someone else’s mouth, it should avoid anything that sounds like self-praise, because it’s about to be read out by a third party.
Two things to be careful about
Don’t let a recruiter submit you to a company you’re already in process with. Say where you’ve applied already, upfront. Duplicate submissions create a fee dispute between the agency and the employer, and the applicant is what gets dropped to resolve it. This is a real and common way to lose a live application.
Don’t send your only resume and forget about it. A recruiter’s copy of you circulates. If it undersells the role you now want, you’ll be presented for the job you had rather than the one you’re after.
The thing not to do
Don’t reply with a full cover letter. They wrote first, the letter’s persuasive work is largely done, and four paragraphs at this stage reads as over-eagerness in a situation where you have the stronger hand.
Short, specific, two questions. If it becomes a real application, that’s the point at which you write properly — and what a cover letter is actually for is a different question from what a reply to an approach is for.