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Comment by dougbarrett | Hacker News Reader

Exactly! I get multiple e-mails a week from recruiters on LinkedIn, and it's not hard at all for me to just kindly decline their offer or ignore it all together. I've never understood the stigma against recruiters, and why you would get mad at someone that wanted to try to place you at a job, that just sounds backwards and unappreciative.

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I think the frustration doesn't come from recruiters per se, but rather the shotgun-approach recruiters.

I've received many recruiter contacts where the position being pitched does seem to logically connect with the experience and skills on my CV.

And then you receive recruiter contacts where it's obvious they're just machine-gunning in the dark, where the jobs being pitched have zero relation to your skills and experience.

There's also some pretty bad recruiter behavior where, if you reply to the initial contact, you've automatically signed up for a massive increase in the volume of communications they send you. I've even had one recruitment firm sign me up for their goddamn company mailing list just for replying to their initial contact.

There's plenty to dislike about tech recruiting. Targeted, sensible contacts are really just the tip of the ice berg.

It also doesn't seem like they've made any effort to combat this kind of blind spamming. I can't rate the quality of a blind inbound from someone I don't know (which is almost certainly from one of their paying customers.) And I can't see how others have rated that individual's communications in the past. So there's really little incentive for recruiters to be more judicious, and that's going to hurt LinkedIn eventually. (But obviously, those are also it's paying customers and most of us are just bait to attract them.)

We expect quality ratings when interacting on Ebay... shouldn't we get them on LinkedIn, which is just another type of peer-to-peer marketplace? They've created something similar with endorsements (for job seekers) but is there anything similar in terms of recruiters?

The problem is... They are trying to place you at a job and taking a commission by obfuscating the actual salary paid by the company. I've personally hired developers, salaried under big recruiting firms, who were getting shorted 35% of their potential income just for allowing someone with a marketing degree forward over a resume. With demand as high as it is for skill sets in the tech fields... you are foolish to believe they serve any purpose other than spam. Especially when spending an hour or so shotgun emailing your resume personally with a cover letter would net you nearly double the salary.

Alas the core issue in this blog post has nothing to do with the abundance of recruiter contact. Anyone with a Linkedin has already managed to figure out how to manage the difference between spam recruiters and the good guys.

Your comment doesn't make any sense to me. It's in the recruiter's best interest to maximize the salary they get the candidate, so that they can maximize the %-amount of the fill. They want to get the candidate 150K so that the recruiter's 30% cut is 45K. If they only get the candidate $125K, then there fee would only be 37.5K.

Are you confusing recruiting for a job with someone that does body-shop contracting?

"It's in the recruiter's best interest to maximize the salary they get the candidate"

Actually, it's in the recruiter's best interest to maximize the return he gets over all his candidates. If he can place candidates three times as fast by offering them at 50% off their market rate, he makes a bigger total commission.

I'd buy that argument in a buyer's market. But I'm not aware of too many recruiters with a surplus of sourced tech talent right now. And they have to go through a lot of effort to source someone...so I'm going to still stand by my comment that a good recruiter is going to maximize the candidates value.

Edit: I'd also add what tech talent is going to be so unaware of their market value that they'd take 50% of it?

I can appreciate someone who took the time to figure out what my experience adds up to and then share a relevant position they're trying to fill. I've had a few companies first find me on LinkedIn, then they contacted me through email with a more personal message, possibly meaning that they looked around the web to find my email address. This I'm cool with. Depending on how the contact goes, they might follow up on LinkedIn to add to my network.

However, the other 90+% of contact I've received I can't appreciate. I've been involved with the CPython project for a while, and I'm on the Python Software Foundation's board. Seeing that sends some of the shotgun recruiters through the roof, trying to "network" with me by sending me bullshit jobs and asking me to share my local contacts. I used to get plenty of messages like, "hey I have this great Django job that you're a perfect fit for." How is this possible when I've never done more than read the Django tutorial, and nowhere on my profile does it mention Django or any other web frameworks? This is a waste of time.

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