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Comment by brucehart | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why it bothers people so much to be contacted by recruiters. I just send a quick reply that says "I appreciate the interest, but I'm not looking for new position right now.". It takes me about 10 seconds to type that sentence and hit send. It takes me such little time that I probably would not remember if they contacted me again a year later.

I'm always grateful to have skills that are in demand. I have friends in other fields that are not so lucky. No need to be the girl that tries to tell everyone how attractive she is by complaining about the attention she receives from guys.

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> I don't understand why it bothers people so much to be contacted by recruiters.

It likely depends on how big your online footprint is. I've been on the Internet publicly since 1989 and hence you can find me all over. That also means recruiters do. I have no problems with the ones who are good at their jobs, but about half are below average, working on commission, and their tactics are the same as spammers (spread yourself indiscriminately far and wide). Many are downright scammers such as taking resumes off the net and then pretending to represent those people, or scraping job postings off websites and then pretending to represent those companies.

At the top of my resume I put a "note to recruiters" that makes it clear what I am good for. It is very clear then which recruiters have made even that miniscule effort, versus just started spamming right away.

I'd say I see about one good recruiter for every 20 spammers. And that is what is bothering. Even worse the lack of response or saying no doesn't deter the spammers so you have to do something about it. I made a blocklist in the end.

http://rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html

> but about half are below average

> I'd say I see about one good recruiter for every 20 spammers

These two seem contradictory, but the second statement strikes me as much more true than the first. Recruiters in this industry seem to be more parasitic and less knowledgeable than even real estate agents, and I say that with great hesitation. Any job where the attracting principle is "ooh money, and I don't even need to know anything!" is probably not usually a service that's worth a damn.

Statement 1 is tautologically true.

No. Consider the sequence (2, 2, 2, 10).

The "average" is not a technical term in statistics. It's a shortcut in everyday speak for some measure of centrality. What you're referring to is (probably) the arithmetic mean, but the average can be any other measure (for example, when you talk about "average speed" you're not using the arithmetic mean, but the geometric one), including the median.

Also, in this case the mean and the median are probably close to the same thing since recruiter skill is likely to be normally distributed, but that's a different story. </nitpick>

I make it clear I am only interested in small companies and startups (and detail why). Consequently a good recruiter for a medium/large company won't contact me at all. OTOH the spammers depend on volume.

I find recruiters to be a piss poor annoyance -- but that's because they call me at least once a day despite the "seriously, no recruiters" advertisement on our company's site. And because they don't understand that if I'm looking for someone with web MVC experience I probably most likely just-kinda-sorta want someone that knows HTML too.

That being said, I wouldn't be that ticked if someone from Google contacted me once every three years. It sounds like the author is just humble bragging.

I got annoyed, but mainly by the volume and persistence of a few bad recruiters. Many recruiters poorly represent their clients. The one that caused me to close my LinkedIn account spelled "projects" as "progects" three times. He worked for Reuters. The problem is gone now, for better or worse. I wish it wasn't something that came off as a humblebrag. Recruiters and head hunters can be legitimately predatory at worst and incredibly thick at best.

I've experienced that too where a few recruiters bombard my inbox with low quality jobs ("Entry-level Java .NET developer needed immediately for six week contract in Frostbite Falls, MN! Up to $40/hr. DOE!"). I just use Gmail to filter those messages into the trash. Protip: Spammy recruiters hate it when you politely decline in response to a LinkedIn message because LinkedIn only charges them when someone replies.

I am the guy who always follows-up with recruiters. But even I can tell you that many of them are quite disrespectful and rarely have something to offer other than the brand of the company they represent.

Just month ago some Google recruiter emailed me to "see what I've been up to". He is not taking emails for an answer, he wants to schedule a phone call at some weird hour. Of course he wants me to submit some paperwork. I say fine, then he cancels at the last moment, another recruiter contacts me to reschedule and forgets about it.

I just hit the archive button :(, but now that I think about it, I should really just draft a canned message.

When I'm absolutely not looking for a job or not interested, I just ignore cold-call recruitment emails. I don't see this as being a negative at all, and I've actually worked with a recruiter after ignoring her for years and it didn't seem to be an issue -- I think they expect it, and because they almost certainly are shotgunning their email out to many people at a time, they aren't crying about you not personally responding.

That aside I've never been contacted directly by Google :( Amazon spams me all the time though. I've never interviewed at either one.

Eh, it just gets grating after awhile. Inboxes are cluttered enough already without getting 10+ emails a day from recruiters, you know?

It's also annoying to try and hit "unsubscribe" from a mailing list only to find out "unsubscribe" does nothing.

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