Tell recruiters politely “no” with a simple link

This goes for internal and external recruiters, in my opinion:

The phone screen always goes just peachy. "Wow, this is great. Awesome experience. You sound great on the phone. We would love to have you come in."

Then you either get rejected after the first round, ghosted after the third round, or shockingly they give you an offer and then after the first month "it isn't working out".

Interviewers are either way too candy-coated or way too curt.

Maybe this is just my experience, but I have over 8 years of legitimate professional experience in this industry and have been employed at megacorps and 20 person companies alike.

I got so sick of the charade that I currently work for an oil company!! Go figure.

I wouldn't find recruiters so annoying if they at least took 15 minutes to figure out who I was and what I'm interested in.

I have only once—once!—received a cold-call (well, email) from a recruiter that was in any way relevant to me as a person and a professional. And I still didn't want it. That's a pretty shitty track record.

“Just doing their job” is never an excuse.

The recruiters that annoy me are the ones who blatantly send me copy and pasted messages while clearly just having done a keyword search (and certainly not reading the parts about what I’m not interested in), who go quiet as soon as I ask for specific information (or make it clear that I expect a sufficiently large benefits package over what I have to make it worth my while), who don’t pay attention to my location but require me to work on site. Basically the ones who are wasting my time and are rude to me. Those people can go f themselves.

I have had a few, rare, great interactions with recruiters who seemed to genuinely care about placing good candidates in good companies in positions that the candidate is well suited to. Unfortunately for every one of those I’ve interacted with, I get 50 messages from the ”hey I have a lowish paying role doing something you specifically said you didn’t want to do” recruiters.

Much like many posters here, I have some preset responses that I send to recruiters. In particular, it’s a “I’m not looking right now, but I’ll save your info and let you know if my situation changes!”. This worked really well when my startup fell apart, and I was able to “scramble the jets” and get interviews set up within a week at a ton of companies. I think that the author confused “polite” with “passive aggressive” (or maybe it’s a cultural difference between my country and Germany).

I always try to leave recruiters with a positive impression, so as to not burn future bridges.

...except Herman Search. Every single recruiter has approached me flashing large salary numbers for boring, stressful sounding financial tech jobs, and being pushy/downright aggressive when I don’t show interest. I’ve asked every recruiter to put me on their do not contact list, but still, every couple of months, I get another generic male white frat bro recruiter, new to the company, reaching out again with the exact same tact. It toes the line between unprofessional and confrontational. With all due respect, which is none, fuck Herman Search.

The hypocrisy is hating on recruiters until you need a job or need to employ someone, then respect.