Ask HN: Recruiters have stopped contacting me? What could have happened?

So I lost my job back last year. I didn’t feel like I immediately needed a new job and I’ve never particularly had difficulty finding one so I figured this time I’d bide my time and see if I could get a job I actually wanted as opposed to just whoever offered a big number that looked good.

Usually, like most devs, I imagine, I get a number of recruiters flooding into my LinkedIn account, particularly if I have my account set to show I’m open to new jobs. At first, this seemed to be the case, but I was being very selective with who’d I’d talk to. If a recruiter wanted me to jump through hoops, or refused to give me any information about the role/company/etc. they were hiring for id just ignore them.

Then around mid-December I just stopped getting any contact from recruiters. Nothing about my LinkedIn profile had changed so I figured people must just be in break for the holidays, and so I decided to just sit around for a while.

But it’s February now and I haven’t had a single recruiter reach out to me since December 16th and I have no idea why. Someone suggested reset and reapply the “looking for jobs” status on my account, but that didn’t seem to work.

There’s only a couple things I can thing of offhand.

1) Remote-status. I’ve read that looking for remote right now might be much more difficult with the flood of candidates into the market, but that doesn’t make too much sense because even though my profile was set to prefer remote, I did get some local recruiters in my inbox for a bit.

2) Weird internal ranking system. Not to sound conspiratorial, but I’ve started to wonder if LinkedIn downranks people in searches if they don’t engage, and around November I was ignoring a lot of recruiters. I’m not sure if it’s likely, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard of something like that.

For reference, I have around 5 years professional experience, mostly in the .NET enterprise world, but have worked with other things in the last and many things outside of work. Anyone noticed this before? Is there anything I can do to get recruiters to start talking to me again, or am I just in a very bad market?

That’s what I was told about Q1, but I suppose I’ll have to keep waiting.

It’s possible, I did put things on pause around late December figuring it was better just to wait for the new year, but have only recently started to actively apply to things again. I suppose this may be it if I see things improve in the coming weeks.

Recruiters were one of the first groups to be laid off?

You can reach back out to the recruiters who previously messaged you ask ask what their openings look like now. Apply to jobs, let your contacts know you are looking. Even if the market is slow, there are always openings.