Career Shift x Gigi

Career Shift (CareerShift HUB) is a community of 150+ coaches and facilitators and runs an ICF-accredited Career Coaching Certification. Ahead of its autumn cohort, the team needed to fill strategy-call calendars by reaching HR and People professionals across Romania.

It could not read as a pitch. The premise was peer to peer: a real conversation about how career conversations and coaching work inside organisations. The certification never led.

It had to sound natively Romanian. Not translated, not AI-generic. HR leaders spot machine-written outreach instantly.

Every message had to be seen before it was sent. The outreach went out under Career Shift team members' own LinkedIn identities, so the team wanted approval control, not an auto-sender.

Gigi ran the outreach as a managed service: it sourced each prospect, scored fit, researched the profile and drafted every message in the sender's voice. A person approved each message before it went out.

• Approval-first. Every connection request and follow-up was reviewed before sending.
• Fit scoring on every prospect. HR and People roles, company size and seniority bands, Romania, a coaching signal. Low-fit profiles were dropped before a message was drafted.
• Existing relationships excluded. People Career Shift already worked with were left out, so the results are new conversations only.
• Native-Romanian messaging. Prompts tuned to remove AI tells, keep one register and personalise only on what was relevant.
• Human cadence. Sending inside Romanian business hours, Monday to Friday, at human daily volume to protect the sender accounts.

Week 1: alignment and build. An ICP and messaging call with the Career Shift team, then fit-scoring criteria, the message sequence and Sales Navigator sourcing.

Week 2 onward: the campaign runs. Continuous sourcing, scoring, drafting and approval, with the messaging refined as real replies came in.

Campaign data as of 5 October 2026; booked calls as reported by Career Shift.

HR professionals researched

1,164

Filtered out as below-ICP before any message

~35%

Connection requests sent

726

Connections accepted

419 (≈58%)

Replies

191 (≈46% of those accepted)

Booked strategy calls

63

Replies came from HR Managers, HR Directors and People and Talent leads at insurers, pharma, manufacturing, distribution and services companies, most scoring 9 or higher against the ICP. One prospect bought the Career Coaching Certification directly.

Against Gigi's averages across active campaigns, acceptance (58%) landed above the 47% average and the reply rate (46%) below the 61% average.

Fit scoring did real work. Dropping about a third of sourced profiles before drafting meant the rates were earned on an on-ICP audience, not a broad list.

Human-in-the-loop tuning. Early drafts leaned on a formulaic profile recap, the pattern that depresses replies with a discerning HR audience. Across review rounds the messages were rebuilt around relevance, native phrasing and a no-recital rule. An auto-sender does not make that correction.

Approval-first protected the brand and the accounts. Every message under Career Shift's identities was seen first, and sending stayed at a conservative pace.