Ask HN: Do you like recruiter spam?

Once.

What made it stand out?

The pitch letter from the recruiter wasn't the bog standard "I saw you have these skills, can you hop on the phone?" email: the recruiter didn't just rattle off a list of 'roles and responsibilities', but actually put down a few lines about a specific production challenge that he believed experience I had a previous role could help the team solve.

Having that kind of intel right up front made that first call and the entire interview pretty memorable. The whole time I kept thinking to myself how different this 'technical recruiter' was from so many others I had talked to. Turns out he was a former engineer who on a whim put his name up for a recruiter spot because he wanted to try it out, and got it.

Ended up working at that place for almost six years. Owe a lot of my career development to that team.

I accepted a job after getting cold called by a recruiter. In terms of email though, the two things that make recruiter emails stand out:

- If the email is actually a properly written job description or other request that doesn't make the person / company sound completely incompetent. (This is probably less than 1% of recruiter emails.)

- If the recruiter seems like a real person then that goes a long way.