I rail against thoughtless recruiters too, but I try to distinguish between thoughtless and typos.

— lauraglu.

I have had the pleasure to interact with a tiny number of good people who work as recruiters. For example, when I was laid off in 2008 one person went to remarkable lengths to assist me with visa uncertainties. I honestly feel very bad for them set in an industry that—if LinkedIn is representative—is dominated by lazy, prospective shit like this.

To clarify my blunt original post: I work with a very fine developer by the name of Dustin. He’s in the same group as me at Yahoo, and we work together. The recruiter message here—and the content that extends beyond my screengrab—was far more appropriate for him than me (though still very generic.) As far as I’m concerned, this was at worst somebody blanket mailing the same group at Yahoo with an identical cut & paste message, and at best was someone blanket mailing the same group at Yahoo with unique emails, and managed to paste the wrong message to me. Regardless, this is the lazy kind that drags them all down. It’s there in the intro that this isn’t trying to fill any particular role, so even if it were just a typo, what’s the response? “Well, funny you should email me as even though I’d made no effort or indication to look for something new it turns out I’m keen to leave Yahoo for a nondescript role anywhere else at all.” Even if I was fed up with my job (hint: I really enjoy my job), I wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s supposed to provoke a voluntary exposition that saves the recruiter doing their job and filtering appropriate candidates for themselves. I’m sure that reading resumés is tedious sometimes, but isn’t gaining a personal understanding of people what makes you good at any job?

Possibly, despite the context, I’m wrong about this specific message, and I protected the identity and employer of the sender out of decency. But crap like this is constant, a weekly drumbeat of substance-free interruption. Should I be flattered by the quantity? I don’t think so. Here are people whose job it is to match the best people to their best roles who don’t take the time to learn (let along understand) even the smallest detail about you or what you’ve ever done. Pasting the wrong name or the wrong message into as impersonal a system as LinkedIn epitomises how little most recruiters care for their prospective clients. In receipt of a response, they’ll just scan it for keywords against the list of secret roles they’re trying to fill that week. Via: benw.