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Comment by glitchcrab | Hacker News Reader

A really good way of weeding out the recruiter spam is to change your first name to an emoji (I use the waving hand) and then put first name and last name in the last name field. That way when a DM opens with 'hello %waving hand emoji%' you know it's just scripted bulk crap.

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Cool idea. I used to have

"[crab emoji] positions only - or get blocked"

in my profile and it did not deter anyone from offering me Java positions.

Okay, but maybe recruiters aren't up on rust iconography. Seems like an ineffective way to communicate a preference (vs it being a shibboleth with the GP).

I mean, unless the recruiter is a rust programmer they're going to have a hard time distinguishing your profile vs just "positions only - or get blocked" (ie don't contact me unless it's about recruitment).

That was very much the intention. I think good tech recruiters should know their field and I know some that do. It's just that LinkedIn is a swamp of bad ones and my little experiment proofed to me that signal noise ratio there is so low that it is useless for me.

Telling someone not to contact you in a way you expect them not to understand seems like a mostly philosophical exercise.

Is it bad to use automation?

Yes. If I want a job without a prior relationship there’s plenty of sites for that like indeed. I’m only interested in job offers from people who have read and valued my work.

Edit: and clearly this is the case because it’s not “Google bot”, it’s a robot pretending to be human like “Amy Bushwack from google” but really it’s a bot

TBH automation for finding/filtering candidates, but preferably personal email to my inbox. I can tell when you’ve used some cruddy software to send automated follow-ups four times after I didn’t respond to the first message.

I agree - I would expect all follow-ups to be personalized. If my job was a recruiter, I would probably use templates for FAQs to save time.

Good idea! Thank you

LLMs have solved this at scale. Really you're just filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters at volume.

Yeah, it was never going to be a forever solution, but it's served me well for the last few years.

Given the average LinkedIn recruiter, filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters is a decent value add.

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