LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit
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LinkedIn is a ghetto of recruiters looking for no benefit contract employees("Oh we see you are an EXTREME CUTTING EDGE WEB2.0 NINJA, would you like to take a $50k contract job?"). Does this work on anyone? I can't imagine any legitimate "superstars" actually respond to these folks.
Edit: the really awkward thing is when it starts recommending you one night stands from years ago just because you may have at some point exchanged an email.
Well, of course not. The goal isn't to get those people. It's to get the people who aren't that good but are just good enough and therefore are actually awed by having someone contact them and refer to them as an extreme cutting edge web 2.0 ninja.
Maybe I just have a shitty linkedin(but it does say plz no recruiters on it)
You are just starting out and the shit recruiter today may very well progress in their career (perhaps they are even a newbie to recruiting) and you may need them down the road.
Even if annoying, no sense to burn bridges. You can always be polite and keep the door open. Your job prospects may be good today but not in 5 or 10 years.
As far as "harassed" welcome to the world of outbound selling. If you were out of a job and were sending out resumes and contacting potential employment prospects how would you like if they said that you were "harassing" them?
Also sure I wouldn't like it if people said I was harassing them with my resume, but I wouldn't be. These people send the same posts over and over to the same people(who, by their linkedin are clearly employed).
I have no idea if they're good at recruiting, I just don't want another job.
I have no idea if they're good at recruiting, I just don't want another job.
Right now. Ten years is a long time, though. There's also a good chance you'll be a completely different person in five. And since your employer has no loyalty to you whatsoever, you may be looking for a new job in even less time.
There's no possible downside in letting recruiters email you.
Totally agree. Over the years I've seen many variations of this. "serious inquiries only" used to be a staple of some classifieds back when people did classified. Essentially people that don't want to be bothered because all they are thinking about is today and what their own needs are. (Of course I don't like to be bothered either and draw the line at certain things as well in some cases of course - I guess it's just where the line is).
One thing I picked up in "this business" back in the 90's was that seemingly important people (VC's for example) wanted to talk to everybody and anybody since they never knew going forward who might be the next star out of the newbies.
It's not a sincere relationship at all - they're just trawling through their latest LinkedIn Premium search.
I don't think it's so bad for other professions, though. My girlfriend has found a job through her Linkedin contacts, and a friend of mine who does sales has found a job through his network there, too.
Keep your eye out this weekend, we're going to go live and leave another post here.
But I'm not a superstar.
That said, it's been infuriating trying to figure out why or where I might know all those "you may knows." And I never contact anyone who contacts me via linkedin, unless they write something non-robotic in the message, because I assume it's a linkedin bot sending messages to an uploaded contact list.
If you dislike it so much, why don't you delete your LinkedIn profile? It's obviously there to facilitate exactly this kind of behaviour, so I don't see why there's any issue around it.
To the contrary, I see these kinds of complaints as being a common form of humblebragging in the developer community. It comes across as: 'Gosh, isn't it tough being contacted by these recruiters all the time because my skills are under such high demand in the labor marketplace. Deleting that one email every few weeks sure does some serious damage to my psychological well-being.'
The substance of this article is about email spam generated by LinkedIn itself. I think we should focus on that, and on the broader issue of where the limits are for email invitations in web applications. The issue this has highlighted (for me at least) is that it is easy to do damage to the reputations for others by putting their names on emails they didn't ask to be sent. This doesn't just mean losing users, it actually means souring and sometimes ruining the valuable relationships that users have with their colleagues and friends. There's a lot of trust and power inherent when someone else's name is put on an email and that isn't something to be sneezed at.
I don't expect to be contacted by recruiters I've never met before on an almost hourly basis during the week.
For my company, this is a genuine nuisance and most of our phone calls are from clueless recruiters offering candidates that don't even have the skills we're looking for.
Even if we needed a recruiter, I'd hardly choose one that called out of the blue. It's getting to the stage where we have to put warnings for recruiters not to contact us because we get so many it's harming our productivity.
So that's why I hate on it.
As an employer, I can say I've never had a good recruitment experience even outside of this situation.
However, I don't expect them to stop any time soon. If this is also a problem for anyone here, the best result is to quickly politely tell them you're not interested. Perhaps ask where they saw your details. Put a note there. Don't stay on the phone for the inevitable questions they've been trained to ask to keep you on the phone. Just say no if you value your time.
For many of us 'Were you mis-sold PPI?" is almost a daily question via SMS.
The sad thing is that at some level it must work.
You have to ignore the obnoxious stuff you don't like with LinkedIn and just treat it as a tool.
They used to be a very useful service.[1] But the closer they got to their IPO the more the started doing things that were clearly in the best interest of generating more page views regardless of how valuable those things were to their users. To my mind this lawsuit was brought about because of that very behavior.
1: Not accounting for the recruiters who have plagued it. Something LinkedIn could probably deal with but they don't want to because that would affect page views.
Why does Linkedin care about pageviews?
Investment Bankers care about pageviews. Valuations are driven by operating metrics when financial metrics alone cannot support a valuation at desired levels. Since linked-in executives get a cut of the IPO proceeds (directly or indirectly), the logical link follows that "the company" cares about these things. Or at least they did in the context of pre-IPO window dressing.
Maybe after their IPO the thought is that they're no longer going to get magical money raining down on them, so they actually have to try to generate more profit?
Although it must be hard for people with option grants when there's a P/E approaching 1000 and you need the price to keep going up to do well.
I'm not against increasing revenue. I'm against scanning my contacts list without my permission so they can invite my friends. What value does this provide to me? None. What value does it provide to them? A ton because if even a small percentage of my contacts signs up then LinkedIn has just increased page views and thus, revenue.
I had to go through several rounds of customer support to get my information off of their site. "You don't have an account" they would repeat - of course I don't, which is why it bothers me that I still get invitations and show up in your "recommended" lists.
Not to mention the fake endorsements.
DKIM does allow you to force the From header to be signed, so hopefully that'll continue to pick up steam. It does break some things, like some mailing lists, and that probably contributes to why it's taken so long to get such things going. There's also a lot of "business critical" software out there that just assumes it can send as any user.
But also: How about the recipients -- who are getting repeated unsolicited commercial emails? How does this activity not violate CAN-SPAM? Shouldn't LinkedIn be subject to fines?
Edit: Although I don't terribly mind the downvote, especially if it was accidental -- I did read the whole article and had a genuine question.
The problem there is the (criminal?) failings of the psychiatrist, not of the scummy behaviour of LinkedIn.
That way, even if there is a site breach, your other accounts are not at risk.
Please add my email addresses to the Do Not Contact List:
andrew@example.com
and.rew@example.com
throwaway@example.com
Thank you,
Andrew
The scary thing is that when you click through the link to confirm, they used to ask you to 'change a password' implying that a ghost account in your name already exists. I just checked it now, and it just offers me to create an account instead.
Maybe I'm just not involved in a lot of circles with folks that do that (looking at signatures of most of my emails, most just have name, email and phone)