{"source":"https://recruited.org.uk","licence":"CC BY 4.0 - use it, say where it came from.","study":{"what":"86 cold emails to real UK employers over four weeks, sent by one person looking for work, logged as they went.","sent":86,"replied":22,"reply_rate":25.6,"reply_definition":"Any message received in reply, including automated acknowledgements and rejections.","benchmark":"Cold outreach is normally quoted at 1% to 5%.","by_recipient":[{"label":"A named human (j.smith@, sarah.brown@)","sent":34,"replied":13,"reply_rate":38.2},{"label":"A hiring inbox (careers@, hr@, recruitment@)","sent":10,"replied":5,"reply_rate":50.0},{"label":"A generic inbox (info@, enquiries@, hello@)","sent":42,"replied":4,"reply_rate":9.5}],"by_source":[{"label":"Printed in the job advert itself","sent":9,"replied":6,"reply_rate":66.7},{"label":"Dug out of the company's own website","sent":77,"replied":16,"reply_rate":20.8}],"listings_with_no_address_found":516,"caveats":["The hiring-inbox row is ten emails. Read 50% as 'about as good as a named person', not as better than one.","The in-advert row is nine emails. 67% will not hold at scale.","These are engineering and technician roles in Scotland, sent by one person over four weeks. A different trade may behave differently.","A reply is not an interview. Plenty of the 22 were polite noes.","Replies here were counted before the machine could classify them, so this 22 includes automated acknowledgements and rejections. The live counter on /numbers uses a stricter definition and reports a lower rate."],"method":"/playbook"},"founder_live":{"applications":171,"replies":32,"reply_rate":19,"employers":137,"updated_at":"2026-09-23T19:10:27.217590+00:00","reply_definition":"A message from a human that was not a rejection. Automated acknowledgements and rejections are counted separately and excluded here, so this rate is lower than the study's and stricter."},"product_live":{"letters":54,"people":1,"tracked":57,"marked":9,"detected":14,"heard_back":23,"interviews":0,"reply_rate":null,"rate_withheld":true,"first_send_at":1789308092,"min_people":3}}