A cold email to a head of people arrives in an inbox that is already a hiring funnel: candidate replies, offer approvals, interview feedback, and the manager who needs a decision by noon. HR tech vendors have discovered this persona in the last few years and the result is a wall of 'employee experience platform' pitches that all read the same, so the default response to an unknown sender is a fast archive. But a head of people has more public signal than almost any other buyer: the number of open roles, the locations, the return-to-office policy, the benefits page, the review-site trend, and the layoffs or hiring surge announced on LinkedIn. Every one of those tells you what they are dealing with this quarter. The three templates below open with one of those signals, make one point tied to time-to-hire or retention, and stay under 90 words. The Claude prompt underneath reads the careers page so the signal is current.
What a Head of People is measured on, and what they delete
A head of people is measured on time-to-hire and offer acceptance while the company is growing, attrition and engagement scores when it is not, and the headcount plan against budget in either case, with the CEO as the reviewer and every manager as a stakeholder. They read email in Gmail between interviews and one-on-ones, often on a phone walking between rooms, and a large share of it is candidate and recruiter mail that takes priority over vendors by default. They delete 'employee experience' and 'culture' pitches on sight, anything that arrives during a visible layoff, and any email that guesses wrong about whether they are hiring or cutting. They reply to emails that read the careers page correctly, that respect how much of their week is already spoken for, and that offer one idea about a problem they are visibly in the middle of.
Cold email to a head of people: the three templates
Check the careers page and the last month of company news before choosing a template. All three assume the company is hiring; if it is not, the Claude prompt below rewrites them for a retention angle instead.
Subject: {{number}} open roles in {{location}}
{{First name}}, {{company}}'s careers page has {{number}} roles open in {{location}}, and {{n}} of them are {{function}}. That is a hiring wave, and the part that usually breaks is scheduling and manager follow-up rather than sourcing.
Candidates go quiet in the gap between the recruiter screen and the hiring manager.
I can send how {{customer}} closed that gap during a similar wave. Useful, or is scheduling already covered?Subject: the manager who has not given feedback
{{First name}}, at {{company}}'s size, offers are usually stalled by one thing: a hiring manager who has not submitted interview feedback and a recruiter who has to chase them.
That chase is where time-to-hire goes, and it is the part of the funnel people leaders cannot see in the ATS.
I help People teams make it visible. Worth a one-line reply on how you track it today?Subject: {{customer}}'s time-to-hire
{{First name}}, {{customer}} was hiring {{number}} people a quarter with a {{team size}}-person People team, about your shape from what is public.
Time-to-hire went from {{before}} to {{after}} days in {{timeframe}} by {{one-line change}}. Offer acceptance moved too, which was the number their CEO actually cared about.
Happy to send the write-up. Better as a doc or a ten-minute call?{{number}} open roles in {{location}}
the manager who has not given feedback
{{customer}}'s time-to-hire
your {{policy, e.g. hybrid}} update
{{quarter}} headcount plan
before the next offer stallsNever send a hiring-speed email in the two weeks around a layoff announcement; the careers page lags the news, so check LinkedIn before you trust the job count.
Personalize these to the account, not just the persona
For a head of people the signal is the careers page and the last month of company news, read together: how many roles, where, which functions, and whether any announcement contradicts it. Getting that wrong, pitching hiring speed during a layoff, ends the relationship before it starts. The prompt below has Claude read both and tell you which mode the company is in.
You are writing a cold email to the Head of People at {{company}} ({{company URL}}).
Read the careers page and count open roles by function and location. Read the last 60 days of company news and LinkedIn posts for hiring announcements, layoffs, a new office, or a policy change (remote, hybrid, return to office). Decide whether this company is in growth mode, steady state, or contraction, and say so explicitly with the evidence.
Then rewrite the three templates below to match that mode. If the company is contracting, discard the time-to-hire angle entirely and write about retention or manager capacity instead. Each body under 90 words, one idea, one soft ask. Mark inferences [INFERRED]. Never guess at engagement or attrition numbers.
Finish with the subject line you would send and the one thing that would make this email tone-deaf if you got it wrong.
MY PRODUCT: {{one-line description}}
PROOF: {{customer, metric, before, after, timeframe}}
TEMPLATES:
{{paste the templates above}}Write cold email at scale with Claude
- B2B cold email templates skill →The Claude skill that writes cold email in your brand voice with the banned-word list and the one-idea rule baked in.
- Cold email from a value prop prompt →The copy-paste prompt version: one value prop in, one specific email out.
- Personalize cold email with Clay and Claude →The use case that runs these templates across a whole list with real enrichment data.
Frequently asked questions
How do you write a cold email to a head of people?
Read the careers page first and let it set the angle: a hiring wave points to time-to-hire and scheduling, a quiet page points to retention and manager capacity. Open with the specific count or policy change you saw, connect it to one problem they are visibly in the middle of, and ask for a one-line reply rather than a meeting. Keep it under 90 words and skip the words 'culture' and 'experience'. A head of people reads between interviews, so the email has to be the easiest thing in the inbox to answer.
What makes people leaders delete a cold email?
Getting the company's mode wrong is the fastest way out: pitching hiring speed to a team that just announced layoffs, or retention tooling to a company doubling headcount. After that, the 'employee experience platform' framing, culture claims, and anything that sounds like it was written by a vendor who has never chased a hiring manager for feedback. Recruiter and candidate mail wins the inbox by default, so anything that reads as a category pitch rather than a specific operational observation gets archived unread.
When is the best time to send a cold email to a head of people?
Right after the careers page jumps, which usually follows a funding announcement or a new fiscal year by two to four weeks, or right after a public policy change like a return-to-office update. Avoid the two weeks around a visible layoff. Within the week, Tuesday to Thursday mid-morning tends to land between interview blocks; Monday is manager one-on-ones and Friday is offer approvals. If you can see when their quarter starts, the headcount plan conversation with finance happens in the month before it.