Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

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I take it one step further: the email address on my resume is a black hole. Its only purpose is to feed an autoresponder who kicks back a warm, generic, email thanking the recruiter for their time, acknowledging they have a difficult job, and lays out my requirements for any position: what I am and am not interested in doing, my salary/hourly/per-project requirements, my location requirements (100% remote), etc. At the bottom, there's another email alias along the lines of 'yesireallydidreadthisgiganticemail2017@mydomain.com' that goes straight to me. I ask the recruiters to not email that address unless they've read the whole thing, and their position matches my requirements. I get 200+ emails to the catch-all autoresponder a month, and maybe 1 (qualified!) reply to the 'its really me' alias every six months. About once a month, I get an email to the 'its really me' alias from a recruiter expressing joy, amusement, and thanks for spelling out what I'm looking for so early in the process. All in all, it's a far more pleasant way to go about passively searching for The Next Big Role(tm).

Have you ever actually got a job that you accepted through this method? Also, what wizardry did you use to get 200+ recruiter E-mails a month? Do you just have a highly optimized resume out there on all the job sites or something?

I get between 30 and 50 a month and all I really did was setup a linked in profile.

Incredible--would you mind sending me your LI profile (privately of course, email in my HN profile)? I'd love to see an example of a profile that generates that much interest, even if it's mostly low signal.

Maybe I am mistaken, but I thought that much recruiter interest on linked in is pretty typical. I live in the Mid Western United States and what was previously mentioned is also true here from my observations. Most of it comes down to having the right keywords and tags I believe. Having .net/java/mobile in your profile nets a lot of messages where I am. Words like Scala/Python/Node/Ruby/etc gets you a bit more.

80% of it is for jobs within the surrounding city, 10% for within the state and 10% out of state. That said, most of these jobs you could also find without the recruiters as well, but sometimes ones from internal recruiters (and if you're lucky a developer/dev manager) are useful.

Interesting. I suppose if I were to ever get 20+ recruiter contacts per month I would retract my previous comment about replying to each of them being cheap time-wise.

Admittedly, I'm not in the market for a developer position, and I deliberately down-play my development experience in my profile, which probably reduces my contact count substantially. I should conduct an experiment wherein I stuff my resume and LinkedIn profile with programming languages and framework keywords for a month and record whether it has an effect on recruitment volume. I suspect it would.

Another interesting bit I've noticed is coworkers getting some of the same recruiter spam from the same recruiter. Seems some of them just blast everyone working for a particular company and hope to get a reply.

It's honestly not that incredible.

Just follow all the guidelines that LinkedIn gives you, so that your profile is an "all-star" and make sure you have a bunch of connections (500+).

An email a day is fairly normal at least for SF engineers.

I think location is very important with these sorts of profiles. I'm on linked-in, Indeed and career builder.

I normally get nearly zero recruiter emails, but late last year I changed my location preferences on Indeed and/or Career builder (I don't remember) from my hometown to Washington DC and suddenly I was deluged with the 20+ recruiter emails per month; more right after I update something on my profile.

Strangely, 1/2 of the emails are for locations far away from DC. I might try changing my preferences to San Jose and see how many more I get.

My "profile" is pretty much just my resume. Experience seems to be another important factor.

> all i really did was setup a linkedin profile

AND work on IT. As an housing architect I received zero offers from recruiters despite having relevant experience. By the other hand I have been contacted several times by IT recruiters once I listed there (irrelevant) IT side projects.

Resuming: it's not you, it's IT..

can you send me the link to your profile, i'd like to increase the interest on mine

Yes, I've gotten my last 3 non-consulting jobs through this method. Before I switched to FT consulting, pretty much all of my jobs were through recruiters. The 'wizardry' is basically having a well put together resume (I've had several people/orgs/etc take a look at it over the years and give me optimization tips), and I maintain profiles at dice, monster, and indeed. That's... about it. I avoid LinkedIn like the plague because I detest the company and its practices, but I'm sure folks who are less picky than me could do something similar on LI and EASILY get more than 200+ contacts a month.

I would be interested in seeing what your resume looks like, at least on a generic anonymized level.

No problem, whats a good email for you?

Edit: heck with it, I've got nothing to hide. Enjoy: https://www.fuzzy-logic.org/file/Lee_Whalen_Resume.pdf

So folks don't abuse my poor auto-responder, here's what would happen if you hit the email in that resume: http://bit.ly/2lxsly3

1) I'm impressed by your technique, and I intend to copy it.

2) The numbers in that autoresponder caused my jaw to hit the floor. I thought I was well compensated but apparently there is a lot of room for me to grow!

Thank you very much, I appreciate!

I think you're right to thank them for their difficult job. I seriously got bored just reading the description of your setup. What percent get through to the second email? Is it like 10%? 50%?

You did get bored, didn't you. He detailed the numbers in his post.

They said 200 emails/month to the general and one every six months to the second email, so that's well under 1%

(1 per month + (1 per 6 months)/6) / (200 per month) = 0.58%.

The more important nugget is that he is contacted about two attractive opportunities a year for his passive method that have a fairly high probability of leading to offers if he is interested. This enables him to: 1. Accurately appraise his worth to companies, 2. Quickly scale to a much higher number of interesting opportunities through the 14 worthwhile recruiters per year that already value his conduct (even if only 2 per year have opportunities with appropriate fit) by actively involving their aid if he becomes dissatisfied with his current employer/role (or they become dissatisfied with him), 3. Identify hiring trends in his field.

I for one think it is a brilliant strategy, and I'll probably adopt it myself!

I'd pay at least a few dollars per month / tens of dollars per year for this service.

I'm not kidding. Dear HN reader, please steal this idea!

If everyone does this, then recruiters will simply start to spam the yesireallydidreadthisgiganticemail2017@mydomain.com emails without reading the autogenerated "profile".

then we make them go through an animated slideshow and do a quiz to get to an email address

And when that gets rigged by some wicked OCR, then a Super Mario simulation where the princess is the realdeal@email.com, and every 10 coins or every level would get them an additional resume-info nugget to consume.

Okay maybe I took it too far.

But at least a few people would be employed making this system.

And we have AI that can play Super Mario now.

Got to keep that arms race going!

You didn't take it too far, someone build the first online recruiter focused video game where the prize at the end of each level is the contact details for a more-and-more suitably qualified candidate.

Turns out Bowser was just trying to hire a competent plumber.

Can I buy more coins directly in the simulation?

What about 1% of people doing this? Or even 0.5%? That is easily enough to live off, and enough to slip under the radar.

To me, getting this done on interesting domains seems to be the hard part. For people with their own domain, getting a separate server to deal with email for that is some hassle. You can't really do this on a generic domain either, cause that looks a lot less professional. Signing people up for gMail accounts might work, but that's probably against google eula. I'd guess the same for other webmail services that are at least somewhat professionally acceptable.

Best way I see is to give people with their own domain as easy a time as possible to set up DNS correctly. Getting through DKIM and SPF reliably seems like a minefield though.

Dude, you can do it yourself with a gmail throwaway. 'hireme.myname@gmail.com' or similar, set your vacation auto-responder appropriately, and have 'realdeal.myname@gmail.com' auto-forward to your real address.

I know how to set up 2 email accounts and forward one to another email. "this service" would presumably be more than allocating 2 email accounts.

Thank you for your contribution

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