I have never got a job through LinkedIn, even though I get loads of contacts from recruiters - as many as 10 per week. The problem is that those contacts are poor quality. They are spammy as heck, basically mass emailing anyone who has a specific search phrase anywhere in their profile.
For the last year my profile bio has opened with the statement "Recruiters: Please tell me what your favourite colour is if you want me to respond to your message." Not one recruiter has actually done that. They literally do not even look at your profile.
I feel like the quality issue is only getting worse over time. Yesterday I received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter that began with "I wanted to reach out as it is almost the end of the year" ...
The same recruiter previously emailed me in December and did not use that phrase, so it's not like he always copy-and-pastes the same thing. However, in his December message, he misspelled my name (which is only 4 letters long), and never even mentioned which company he is hiring for -- it was only apparent in his signature line.
This was a Google recruiter, hiring for staff+ level SWE roles.
My personal pet peeve is when recruiters talk about the qualifications and tech stack at length but completely leave out what the product / company is.
I know there are a lot of devs out there, particularly junior and intermediates, who are looking to work with their favourite tools or something they've not worked with before. But after 25 years in the industry, having worked with several "stacks" and programming languages and worked through many popular paradigm shifts, I care far more about what I'm building than I do what tools I'm using to build it.
A really common one I get is emails about Java jobs where the recruiter praises me for all my Java skills and experience and talks about how I would be the perfect candidate for the job they have. The thing is nowhere in my profile does it say I have Java experience (I'm all C#/.Net), however it does mention JavaScript in a few places. They couldn't be any more obvious with their laziness.
Yea that's the best, when they start out saying how they went over your profile and all the amazing things you've done in XXX language even though that's not listed on your profile at all!
I sometimes get messages where they are searching for candidates with C# or Java experience, also telling me that I seem like a perfect candidate. I do have a little bit of that but for the past ten years I have only been working with embedded sw development (C and C++) so obviously they didn’t read very carefully. I have gotten good contact with good recruiters using LinkedIn as well though so it varies quite a lot.
I think we have this post every few months on this site, so let me explain how recruiting works.
There's 3 types/market for recruiters and they almost never overlap.
The first are "body shop style" recruiters. It's basically a numbers game where they try to cold-call as much people with githubs/linkedin or blogs that reference programming. They don't know programming (not even what's the difference between languages or front-end/back-end) and are looking for a list of buzzwords. They'll send copy-pasted messages (you can tell because it references tech you never used or never even claimed to have used). If you respond (and really you shouldn't) you won't be able to get any relevant information about the position because... they don't have it. These recruiters are often contracted by external firms in "best value countries" and are given canned response to message you. That's probably what the author encountered.
Second type are professional recruiters. Their salary is by commissions will often be a percentage of your salary. They are knowledgeable about programming and tech (often former engineers who wanted a break from coding!). They typically are looking to match specific profiles to specific jobs at client companies. This goes all the way to recruiters specialized in C-Suite executives (and you can picture the commission finding a CEO will bring in). Their messages will be personalized and you shouldn't hesitate to reply back even if you aren't looking for a job. They know that most great software engineers are almost never openly looking for a job so their goal is to be on good terms with a large number of talented developers so that the minute they start looking for a job they can match them with positions. You'll know when you encounter one.
Third type is basically referrals. A players attract A players, smart companies know it. Make sure your referral bonus is a percentage of total comp. It's probably the most effective way of recruiting (it has an insane signal to noise ratio). But you only get access to that type of network by... bringing value and being part of it in the first place!
My point was more that even Google -- a company with a 1.9 trillion dollar market cap -- is now relying on cut-and-paste-error recruiters, even when sourcing for roles which pay $500k+.
I've seen a lot of cringey recruitment communications over the years, but rarely encountered it for very senior roles at top companies in the past. Seems way more common now.
In my experience, Google and Amazon recruiter emails tend to be the most poorly written, confusing and unprofessional emails I receive from recruiters.
My counter anecdote 1 I’d never really used LinkedIn much, but a FAANG recruiter found me on it. That’s how I got my interview, which I passed, which changed my life for the better.
Mass recruiters are the problem here. I’ve never tried the brown M&M strategy, Instead I prefer to just tell them no thanks when it’s not interesting.
I am a programmer and indirectly got my current job via Linkedin. In 2019, a big four accounting firm contacted me on Linkedin to do consulting work for them. I would not have thought of applying to them but since they reached out I talked to them and was hired, and was placed at a Fortune 100 company. A year later (2020) I was hired by the F100 company.
Recruiters from Meta/Facebook and other companies have reached out to me since then. The non-spammy ones directly from companies I respond to, but told them I am not currently interviewing.
In your settings you can check if you're active looking, casually browsing etc. If you're marked as actively looking you might get more incoming.
This doesn’t apply to folks who want contacts for what’s in their profile, but: sometimes you’d like employers to know what relevant adjacent skills you have, without recruiters hitting them as search terms.
For that purpose, I masked all of my software terms like “java” from my EE profile with homoglyphs: humans can read them, but they don’t match search terms.
Lifehack: put an emoji as the first character in your name. If a recruiter includes that emoji in a message, such as “ Hi :fire: John,”, then you know that it’s spammy.
It's interesting what happens when certain recruiters send a follow up message when I don't answer first time. When that happens I tell them to read my profile carefully. Some then get it and send me a colour and a few have got a bit shirty saying I am being unprofessional or that I am being unreasonable expecting them to read my profile given the pressures they are under.
True, but DoubleGlazing didn't answer the first time. That isn't someone who "needs a job more than they don't want to be inconvenienced". That's a recruiter that wants to find someone to fill a job more than they want to respect your desire to not be inconvenienced. And I don't have any sympathy.
> Just seems like GGP is trying to avoid being hired by a string of people not detail oriented.
I'd add that recruiters that spam people without any criteria or attention are a telltale sign that you are already expected to be treated as disposable and unworthy of attention even way before you are even made an offer.
Pretty much. I have always found that it is better to send out fewer customised job applications, rather than send out loads that are all the same.
I wish recruiters would do the same. If I engage with recruiters that use the scatter gun approach then it is inevtable that they will be wasting my time as they just aren't interested in detail and effort.
I had one send me a 4th follow up email this morning which seems excessive. The funny thing is, all the emails are spammy - it's clear that she sends all 4 of these to everyone on some schedule.
Spam sandwiches can be tasty though: that's how I got my current job. A recruiter sent me a LinkedIn message that was either intended for someone else, or she forgot to change the name at the beginning of the message.
Didn't matter; got job. I just replied "Hi Rebecca, I'm not Bhargav, but that position looks interesting" Fast forward a few months and I'm at a new place that seems pretty nice so far.
While I understand the sentiment and don't like LinkedIn, I would assume a recruiter view in the app shows aggregated data, or they would be looking at hundreds of profiles everyday.
I also did something similar saying that "My rates start at $150", and recruiters were still contacting me for $13.
There is a high likelihood that that those scatter-gun recruiters aren't placing people into appropriate jobs.
Most recruiters have one goal, get candidates into a job - any job. Then they get their fee. They do not have an obligation to get a candidate in to the most suitable job. In my experience they will happily lie, flatter and cajole you in to doing their bidding and taking a job that is not right for you.
I don't want to deal with recruiters like that and that's why I try to filter them out.
Recruiter sends out spam to everybody fitting X parameters.
If you find the company and position interesting you can respond.
A recruiter will actually look at your profile and if they think you’re a good match, go from there.
I still find it useful overall because once you respond to the recruiter, you have a decent in with the company. You do need to wait for actually good positions to come in (which would be true anyway if they were looking at your profile), but you can literally just ignore them all until you are looking to actually job hop.
This is why I deleted my LinkedIn profile and would suggest others to the same. It has become nothing more than a spammy network that collects way too much personal information.
> This is why I deleted my LinkedIn profile and would suggest others to the same. It has become nothing more than a spammy network that collects way too much personal information.
Could you please elaborate on your concerns? I mean, LinkedIn is a professional network whose whole point is to allow people like you and me to expose personal details we chose to disclose to recruiters and companies with the goal, direct or indirect, of advancing our career.
Knowing this, how exactly can anyone complain that a service whose sole point is to allow you share your profile info with recruiters is sharing your profile info with recruiters?
If you create a professional profile, yet still opt out of looking for new work, LinkedIn still sells your data to recruiters and not just public data but your hidden data as well and allows recruiters to pay a small fee to obtain private information that you have intentionally hidden and to contact you about jobs that you've specifically said you don't want to be contacted about.
I suggest putting the blurb somewhere in your employment history. Your LinkedIn profile gets scraped and imported by various recruiting software. They often don't import the bio blurb (although they probably should).
This won't eliminate the spam, but will increase your chance of a recruiter seeing the blurb.
Are you trying to force them to see the blurb though? Van Halen could have put a callout to the brown M&M clause in a very prominent place in the contract, had a lot more venues see the clause and, by so doing, make it no longer a useful measurement of their attention to detail and level of effort.
Would you find any utility in an app, or a service, or something ... that would interact with recruiters on your behalf, screening offers so you only ever see the 2% that might be interesting?
Same here. have worked 13 years in senior Data Analytics roles and I got an alert recently from LinkedIn that I would be a perfect fit as a Data Analytics Trainee...
For the last year my profile bio has opened with the statement "Recruiters: Please tell me what your favourite colour is if you want me to respond to your message." Not one recruiter has actually done that. They literally do not even look at your profile.