29 SEPTEMBER 2026 · 6 MIN READ

We read 583 job postings looking for someone to write to. We found three people.

The most repeated piece of cover letter advice is to avoid "Dear Hiring Manager" and address a real person instead. Find them on LinkedIn, the advice goes, or check the company's team page. Nobody ever checks the obvious first source — the job posting itself. So we did, across 583 live postings, and the answer is almost never.

What we did

We took the same random sample described in our survey of what postings ask for: 600 live postings drawn on 29 September 2026 across 70 randomly chosen role-and-location pages, of which 583 carried a real description. Then we searched every description for any route to a human being — an email address, a named individual, a line saying who the role reports to.

The result

Five postings out of 583 carried an email address belonging to a person rather than a department — and those five resolve to three distinct individuals. Everything else was a role: careers@, hr@, recruitment@, talentacquisition@.

Not one posting named a person in prose

We also searched for a human named next to a contact instruction — "contact", "reach out to", "speak to", "get in touch with". Nineteen postings matched the pattern. We read all nineteen by hand. Every single one named a job function, not a person:

• "please reach out to your Talent Partner"
• "should contact the Talent Team"
• "please contact Human Resources"
• "contact a Pathward People & Culture Representative"
• "speak with your Talent Acquisition Partner"
• "you can contact our Data Protection Officer"

Zero of 583 postings told you a human being's name. And the phrase everyone is trying to avoid writing — "hiring manager" — appears in only 9 postings, 1.5% of the sample. The person the advice tells you to find is not merely unnamed; they are barely referred to.

What the postings do say is who you'd report to

58 postings — 9.9% — stated who the role reports to, and that is the closest thing to a lead in the whole dataset. It is a title rather than a name: "reports to the Director", "reports to the Chief Accountant", "reporting to the VP of Customer Success", "reports to the Founder".

That is genuinely useful, and it is the one piece of the standard advice our data supports. A title plus a company name is a searchable thing. A blank is not.

So what should you actually do?

• Check the posting first — it takes ten seconds and works 13% of the time. That is low, but it is higher than zero and it is the cheapest check available.
• Look for the "reports to" line. One posting in ten has one. A title and an employer is enough to find the person, and it comes from the employer rather than a guess.
• Write "Dear Hiring Team" and stop feeling bad about it. In 86.6% of cases the employer has published no route to any human. Addressing a letter to a person the posting declined to name is not a signal of diligence; it is a puzzle the employer chose to set.
• Spend the saved time on the form instead. We found that the average application carries fifteen questions after the CV upload, several of which are hard gates. That is where applications are actually lost.

What we are not claiming

We read the description text as published on our own job pages. An employer might name a contact on their own careers site, in an attachment, or in an auto-reply after you apply, and we would not see it. This measures what is in the posting you read before deciding to apply.

Our classification of an address as "a person" versus "a department" was done by hand on all 61 distinct addresses found, but it is still a judgement — a small company's info@ may well reach one named individual. The direction of the error is toward overcounting people, which makes 0.9% a ceiling rather than a floor.

And this is a sample of employers using the ten hiring systems we index, skewed toward the larger ones. Small employers advertising by email are precisely the case that would push the number up, and they are under-represented here.

Method: 600 live postings sampled at random on 29 September 2026 from 70 randomly selected role-and-location pages on ottoroles.com; 583 carried a description of 40 words or more. Email addresses were extracted by pattern and all 61 distinct addresses were classified by hand as role or individual. Named-person matches were read individually. Reproducible by any reader from the same public pages.