Comment by jval | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jval | Hacker News Reader

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I've always been puzzled by people who hate on recruiters contacting them through LinkedIn.

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 thought the purpose was to keep a list of professional contacts I know.

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.

Just to follow on from this... perhaps to understand my acrimony, people from outside the UK might be interested to know that at times it seems as if we have an economy powered by an army of unskilled 'service sector professionals' calling the entire population trying to sell recruitment, utilities and PPI claims.

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.

There's no way getting contacted by recruiters (most of whom aren't reputable if they've got to resort to cold contacting via Linked In) is humblebragging. It's a total pain in the ass and I shouldn't have to delete my linked in account just to prevent it happening. In fact, recruiters that abuse Linked in like this should have their accounts deleted.

Agreed. Complaining that you are spammed with potential job offers is like complaining about how expensive it is to replace the high-performance tires on your Porsche. Please don't forget that there is still high unemployment across the US and abroad.

Linked seems to be completely useless both for the jobless and for those with jobs. As an unemployed person I hope you can understand why I both don't delete my account and hate the spam.

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