Researching the hiring manager before you apply means you can tailor your application to a real person, not a blank inbox. It takes less than 20 minutes and can make your cover letter or email feel genuinely personal.
Why It Actually Matters
Most applicants send the same CV everywhere. If you know a little about the person reading yours, you can adjust your tone, highlight the right skills, and show you understand what they care about.
A hiring manager who feels "seen" is more likely to read your application properly. That's the whole point.
What to Look For
You don't need to dig into someone's personal life. Stick to professional, publicly available information.
Here's what's worth finding:
- Their role and background. Are they a specialist in your field or a generalist HR manager? This tells you how technical your language can be.
- Recent public activity. A LinkedIn post, a conference talk, or a quote in a trade article can tell you what problems they're currently focused on.
- How long they've been at the company. Someone who joined six months ago is probably still shaping the team. A long-timer may have very set ideas.
- What the team they manage looks like. If you can see who reports to them, you get a sense of the skills gaps they might be trying to fill.
- Any shared connections. Even a weak shared contact is worth a brief, polite mention in your cover note.
Where to Find This Information
Start with LinkedIn. Search the company and look at the "People" tab. Filter by department if you can.
Also try:
- The company's own website, especially the "About" or "Team" page
- Google News for their name plus the company name
- Twitter or X if they post about their industry
- Conference or event websites where speakers are listed
- Podcast guest lists in your industry
You won't always find much. That's fine. Even one or two facts are enough to personalise your message.
How to Use What You Find (Without Being Weird)
Keep it professional and light. A good rule: only reference something the person shared publicly and professionally.
If they recently posted about building a data team, you could write: "I saw you've been expanding the data function at [Company]. My background in SQL and reporting is exactly what I'd want to bring to that effort."
That's specific, relevant, and not at all strange. What you want to avoid is mentioning personal details, holiday photos, or anything that would feel like surveillance.
A Copy-Paste AIDular Prompt
Keeping up with a hiring manager's public activity over time is hard to do manually. You can set up a scheduled search in AIDular to do it for you.
Here's a prompt you can copy and adapt:
"Search for recent public activity by [Full Name], [Job Title] at [Company Name]. Include any LinkedIn posts, news quotes, interviews, conference appearances, or published articles from the past 30 days. Summarise the key themes they seem focused on."
Set it to run weekly while you're actively applying to that company. AIDular will email you a clean, sourced summary on schedule, so you're always up to date before a call or interview.
A Quick Note on Timing
Do your research before you write your cover letter, not after. The whole point is to let it shape how you present yourself.
If you get called for an interview, do a second, deeper pass. Look for anything new in the last two weeks. Hiring managers notice when candidates are genuinely current.
Try this approach on your next application and see how different it feels to write to a real person. If you want to track multiple hiring managers or companies at once without the manual work, AIDular's free Lite plan is a good place to start.