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The Best Recruiters – followup to The Recruiter Honeypot (ewherry.com)
82 points by jianshen on Aug 7, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments



"One last tidbit, recruiters don’t read blogs. Surprisingly, Pete’s inbox has continued flowing since the initial honeypot email post — roughly one ping every 31 hours — with no signs of dwindling."

I recently switched jobs and found that simply turning my Monster and Dice profiles to public/looking for a matter of days resulted in months (and still going) of backlogged pings from recruiters. I'm not so sure if it that they don't read blogs as it is that many of them exist at the end of some weird data pipeline I don't quite understand.


Probably a lead generation system; a friend of mine just told me the same story. I'm a little surprised that these systems don't have some kind of staleness or backoff mechanism such that you're still receiving pings.


Setting your profile to Public allows recruiters to scrape your data for future use.

http://blog.brusic.com/2012/07/how-private-is-your-online-jo...

Still interesting that they don't read blogs.


I made a comment similar to this when the honeypot story was first posted here. I took down my LinkedIn account and the number of recruiters contacting me has dropped to just shy of zero. But I still have my StackOverflow account (including a Careers acount), github account and home website.

The recruiters that do still contact me are very good. They are tech savvy, very understanding of my interests, skills and projects I've done, and are very much looking to create a relationship with me. Some of these recruiters I talk with on a regular basis. They ping me every few months to see how I'm doing and there's respect flowing in both directions.

So what I don't get, is why do "recruiters rely exclusively upon linkedin" (quoted from the honeypot post)? If they're recruiting tech jobs, why aren't they going to where the tech people are? I found LinkedIn a nuisance at best, yet I rather enjoy StackOverflow and github.


LinkedIn has many tools for them that you can't see. GitHub and StackOverflow lack these tools. LinkedIn is irritating to you because you're not the customer, you're the product.

If you paid for a LinkedIn premium account you'd get a lot of people-search tools that would make it look better. Well, at least better for what recruiters do.


They get paid for bodies and until HR folks get savvy, they pick the place that has the least work involved and most bodies.


Caring about your job isn't solely the domain of engineers.


There are plenty of lazy engineers too.


Not saying that at all, and really not pleased about your interpretation as I was answering the posts question about why a subset of recruiters only search LinkedIn. The type of recruiter that only searches LinkedIn is probably doing the churn and not doing careful, considerate work.

I believe most professions have people who care deeply about the job they do and also have people who learn to churn.


Tip number 1 is something you should always do in emails. Framing it from the point of view of the recipient is way more effective than talking about yourself. Unsurprisingly, we all love to say "I" and "we" more than "you"


Saying "I" a lot is usually a sign of submissiveness/inferiority/deference anyway.


Should emails be dominant/superior/disrespectful?


I'm not making a value judgment, I'm mentioning something that comes from recent research.




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