DMs Are the New Cover Letter: How to Get Hired in AI in 2025/2026
How you should go about DM'ing others for job opportunities and a few other tips to stand out
Last week I posted a role my team is hiring for on X and LinkedIn (check them out because we’re still hiring!) and I received hundreds of messages. Sorting through them made one thing clear—people suck at presenting themselves.
It’s a tough market right now and differentiation is more important than ever. Most great jobs aren’t found by cold applying to positions, but through one’s network. DMs are the new cover letter and understanding how to DM properly is paramount to optimally present oneself.
This article uses my experience on the hiring side of DMs to teach you how to DM for a job properly. I share this primarily because I think it’s important and AI for Software Engineers readers should stand out, but also because I learned a lot about what I was doing incorrectly too.
I’ve split this into five parts. In this new
sletter, I explain:
The current job climate and why that’s the first thing to understand.
How to set up a good elevator pitch.
Why your resume is still important.
The things you should avoid.
One final tip.
1. Understand the current job climate
The current job market is weird. Overall demand for software engineers has gone down, but demand for developers with experience in AI is at its peak. This means we have a lot of people competing for jobs, but for many roles there are very few qualified applicants.
To put things into perspective, only a few hours after posting about the open role, I had ~100 DMs on X and about half that on LinkedIn. Over the next few days, I had hundreds on both platforms. Yet, only a small group of candidates were actually a good fit.
