Hacker News Reader

Comment by chevman | Hacker News Reader

Easier pro-tip - on your LinkedIn profile, spell your employers name in an odd way - an uncommon misspelling or punctation in strange places.

Catch all the LinkedIn scraper spammers this way since 2010, yo!

No AI needed, lol.

View on HN

I always put "stealth start-up" as whatever company I am currently at for historical reasons I won't cover here. But listed my current company as "stealth start-up" is an automatic filter for spam & bots.

"Hey Justin, love what you're doing at Stealth start-up..." or "We were looking through Stealth Start-up's web site and noticed..." or "Your work at Stealth Start-up has been amazing, would you be open..."

Let's me roundfile an awful lot of dross really fast.

I've done similar using homoglyphs.

It's surprising how much crap you can cut down on even when you explicitly turn off all e-mails from a service.

We’re doing something similar, and we get a bunch of

“We love what you’re doing at ${company_name} | The ${industry} Platform!”

Also there are things like "your colleagues at Stealth StartUp spoke highly about you" that show up in my inbox. There are no colleagues at a one-person start up.

Finally some explains why I see so many "full sack programmers" on there!

Here was me thinking that was just another way to say brogrammer.

i found an even more effective method, which is to delete my profile. In seven years if using that site i never got a single meaningful interview from somebody who contacted me on linkedin.. every time i go to a job interview with somebody who found me on linked in, they end up telling me during the interview that they don't think i come from the right background for this position despite the fact that they are the ones who contacted me.

It did however lead to one fairly entertaining interview at a large well-known company that makes virtualization software in which the person interviewing me didn't believe me when i told him that the realloc function exists.

Even easier pro-tip: just don't have a linked in profile

What I do/used to do is to replace the 'a' in my firstname with the cyrillic 'а'. And then I have a short JS snippet to highlight every div with that char.

It's invisible but it does have the "downside" that I no longer appear in search results when searching my firstname.

Emoji in name works in many cases as well

My first name is “<my first name> <a random emoji>”

Anytime I get a “Hi <first name, emoji>” message, I know it is from a ~~spam bot~~recruiter and ignore.

Can confirm, we have "(official page)" appended to our LinkedIn company name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com