Who to contact about a job, and how to find them honestly

Who, in order

• The hiring manager: the person the role reports to. They decide, and they know what the posting leaves out.
• The recruiter for that function: they run the process and can tell you where your application stands.
• Someone doing the job now: they can tell you what the work is really like, and sometimes refer you.

Where to look

• The posting itself: some name the hiring manager or the team.
• The company's own pages: team pages, leadership pages, engineering and design blogs, press releases.
• Talks, podcasts and articles: people who speak in public about their work usually welcome a thoughtful note about it.
• Professional profiles: useful for a name and a role; check that the person is still at the company.

Published addresses, not guessed ones

Tools that guess an address from a name and a company's email pattern are common, and the guesses are often wrong: they bounce, reach a namesake, or land in a spam filter. A guessed address also tells the reader you found them by pattern rather than by their work. Write to an address the person or the company has published, or use the company's own contact route.

What to write

Four sentences are enough. Who you are, in one line. The role, with its link. One specific reason you fit or care, ideally tied to something they built or said. One small ask: a fifteen-minute call, or the name of the right person to talk to.

Follow up once, a week later, with one new line. Then let it go.

How Carir researches contacts

For a role you save, Carir researches the people around it on public pages: the posting, the company's site and other pages a web search turns up, read under each site's robots.txt rules. Each person comes with the page the information came from, quoted word for word, and a confidence label: Confirmed, Likely or Unverified. An email address appears only when a public page prints it and it matches the person's name; Carir does not guess addresses.