Career Shift: 114 call requests in a two-month pilot

Career Shift wanted strategy calls with HR and People professionals ahead of its autumn certification cohort. Three things ruled out a standard outbound push.

It could not read as a pitch. The conversation had to be about how career conversations and coaching capability work inside organisations. The certification was never allowed to lead.

It had to sound native. Romanian HR leaders spot machine-written outreach instantly, and so do experienced coaches in the UK. One stiff phrase or a missing diacritic ends the conversation.

Every message had to be seen first. Outreach went out from the Career Shift team's own LinkedIn accounts, so the team wanted approval over every message, not an auto-sender.

• Approval-first. Gigi sourced, scored and researched every prospect and drafted every message in the sender's voice. A person approved each one before it went out, and sending ran in local business hours at a human daily pace.
• Fit scoring before any message. More than a quarter of sourced profiles were filtered out before a word was written, so effort went only to people who fit.
• Only new conversations. People Career Shift already worked with were excluded, and IT-adjacent HR roles were removed after the first weeks.
• The right sender for each audience. A team member with an HR background wrote to HR and L&D leaders in Romanian; a coach on the team wrote to UK coaches, coach to coach.

Week 1. Alignment call with the Career Shift team on ICP and messaging, then the campaign build: target profile, fit-scoring rules, message sequences and Sales Navigator searches.

Week 2 onward. Campaigns live. Messaging refined round after round from real replies: native phrasing, no profile recitals, one clear question.

Month 2. A larger Romanian HR list, a UK coaches campaign, and the UK HR lane moved to the sender whose background matched the audience.

Prospects researched

1,890

Filtered out as low fit before any message

512 (27%)

Connection requests sent

1,357

Connections accepted

766 (56%)

Conversations opened

330 (43%)

People who asked for a call

114

Certifications sold during the pilot

First sale closed

Gigi campaigns typically see 40 to 47% connection acceptance. Career Shift reached 56% overall and 61% on its main Romanian HR list, and 45% of the UK coaches who connected replied.

A conversation, not a pitch. Messages opened on how career conversations and coaching work inside organisations, and were rebuilt several times from real replies, something an auto-sender cannot do. People understood the offer before the call: only two calls closed as the wrong profile.

Fit scoring did real work. The people who booked averaged 8.7 out of 10 at sourcing, and several already held a coaching or psychology credential.

The sender has to match the audience. Coaches replied to a fellow coach. The same sender writing to UK HR directors drew little response, so that lane moved to the team member with an HR background.

The pilot surfaced demand Career Shift had not pitched: HR leaders asking about programmes for their whole organisation and about outplacement, coaches offering referrals, and people asking to be contacted for the next cohort. It was the first of several planned use cases.