Automatically detecting and replying to recruiter spam

Somewhere between your first job - where recruiters feel invaluable - and your tenth things start to change. You go from having a bit of contact with a few recruiters to being daily contacted by a huge number of cut-rate recruiters who want you to take this "GREAT OPPORTUNITY" to make $15/hr without benefits across the country. You get spammed by people who think you want to be a junior Java engineer for some poorly organized startup because your LinkedIn says you used Java once, fifteen years ago. They're mostly agency recruiters and you will learn that these are very often overselling how much they can actually help you.

Later on, you find out that they think they're clever by working hard to avoid telling you how much the position pays. They say they care about your background and you're a great fit before asking questions that they should already know the answer to.

They're salespeople and generally working leads with minimal effort. Being nice to them rarely pays off, and I've found humoring them with kindness and empathy to disturbingly often be a complete waste of my time. More often they seem to be doing the thing salespeople do where they set out to prey upon my basic human desire to be kind, compassionate, and empathetic.

I humored one literally yesterday. They had no idea how much the position paid. They knew nothing about the company I hadn't learned from five minutes on Google. They claimed to have read my LinkedIn and asked questions that showed they clearly had not paid attention in any way to the last four years of my career. If this is who the company wants representing them, I'm not sure I want anything to do with them. All told, this was an above-average recruiter (emailed first, responded to email, scheduled a call, kept an appointment, a few other things), but still pretty terrible.

I expect this recruiter wanted me to be excited for the great opportunity to work for a growing global company with great funding and seasoned leadership and exciting new technologies in a growing market or some such thing. Selling the sizzle rather than the steak. Most recruiters seem to bank on that.

What did I get from humoring them? Twenty fewer minutes from my day. Nothing more.

That's the point of the post you are replying to: don't be in business of hiring mechanics if you have no clue that there are "tire" and "engine" ones.

Consider the following: The majority of professionals in ANY field are mediocre at best, given the distribution of talent. Most developers aren't 10x folks. Most professional athletes aren't superstars. Most recruiters aren't insightful, matchmaking geniuses. In most cases, the market seems to work.

In the case of developers, truly elite talent is not compensated anywhere near 10x (or 100x) the standard-issue rate (unless they become founders). Thus, there is a massive incentive to cast a wide net, and hope to land a big fish for whom circumstances have misaligned.

For prospective employees, the best jobs are typically those one obtains through a network rather than a recruiter anyway - leading to a reluctance to engage, thus requiring a wider net.

Bottom-line, a few elite recruiters can and do behave differently. A few elite developers can and do earn more, and for the rest of us mere mortals, this paradigm is probably the equilibrium. Curious if automating responses to automated emails would lead to ever larger/wider outreach?

These days, receiving a third-party recruiter email has a very weak correlation with skills or ability to get a good job. Even FAANG recruiters frequently email me about roles I’m obviously not qualified for, and ignore me if I reply back to ask about opportunities which align with my skillset.

First-party recruiters are usually fine. They’re how I got my first industry job, and they can guide you through the application process and add a human touch.

The reason software developers get annoyed by third-party recruiters is their invasive, persistent tactics. My email address and phone number aren’t on LinkedIn, because I don’t want to be contacted outside of the platform. But that doesn’t stop spammers from figuring out my Gmail address based on my name [1] and sending me several spam emails every day. In one case someone went so far as to call my personal cell number during working hours.

If I acted like that, cold calling and emailing a hiring manager, it would obviously be inappropriate. It’s the same for the recruiter who sends me “opportunities” to leave my current job which I like quite a bit in exchange for a 3-month contract role using technologies I have no experience with whatsoever.

[1] https://www.uplead.com/find-emails-on-linkedin/

Yeah, I think HN strips emoji

For example, I’m including 5 below: