I do not get that many emails/contacts from recruiters, and I find a quick polite email exchange or one phone call allows to quickly clarify the situation and we're done.
I actually welcome recruiters contacting me, it keeps me in the loop of what's going, market rate etc... and sometime help me finding new gigs.
EDIT: It seems that where you are located makes a big difference. I get a few emails a week, almost zero spam. People in the bay area reports dozen of emails a day from robots based on keywords, that would indeed be frustrating.
It seems to have gotten a lot worse lately, and the recruiters all seem to copy each other now:
Recruiter: You seem to be a perfect candidate for job A.
Really? That's nice. I'll read on to see the offer...
Recruiter: The position is a senior role using X, Y, Z
Wait a minute, I don't use X, I've only seen Y once and haven't worked in Z for years. What makes this person think I'm right for this position?
Recruiter: Can you send me your resume.
Oh, I see. CV scraping. They collect them for their portfolio I guess, or sell them on or something. It really isn't worth replying if they couldn't even be bothered to read the Linkedin profile they sent a message to, from which it would have been clear that I am in no way a perfect or appropriate candidate for said position.
I've also noticed that Linkedin profile scraping has become more prevalent over the years. I've countered this by adding a few fake skills to my profile.
> "With your underwater basket-weaving chops, the <redacted> team will surpass its goal of exceeding 100M users by 2015."
These, usually more subtle markers, are helpful to scan for when glancing through any recruiter emails.
I don't mind either, but what's annoying is how frustratingly vague they are when they are contacting me first. A typical example:
Recruiter: "I have a great senior engineering position and you're a perfect match!"
Me: "Great. Can you send me a job description and tell me more about what field they're in? I'm an embedded guy and I'm going to want to know if this is (for example) medical, automotive, HMI, or something else."
And this is where things completely go to hell. The typical response is a job description that reads as "must know how to write software" and I've even gotten repsonses like "the client is starting in a new sector and is so stealth they can't talk about it." Seriously?
The other annoying trend now is the marketing and sales types that are scraping LinkedIn for buzzwords and cold calling you based on that. Don't believe me? Put the word "IoT" somewhere in your top description block and watch your inbox and voicemail over the next two weeks.
I really don't mind the emails. It's the cold calls that bug me. I'll be sitting at my desk, happy and content and writing code, when my phone starts to buzz.
"Odd," I say, "I don't know anybody from Massachusetts.. maybe it's important!"
So I answer.
"Hello, I am calling from [recruiting company] and have a perfect position for you doing [x, y, and z]! Are you interested?"
Now I think to myself that maybe the job will be good, maybe the pay will be higher than what I'm currently getting, maybe it will be doing something I enjoy. So I say "Okay, sure. Tell me more."
The response is the same every time "Okay, I will send you an email to [my email address] if you would kindly respond with haste!"
I politely say thanks and hang up the phone. I go to check my email and sure enough, there it is- "Hello, I am with [recruiting company] and have a perfect position for you doing [x, y, and z]! Kindly fill out the info below and send me your resume."
WHY?! WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME IF YOU'RE JUST GOING TO SEND ME AN EMAIL SAYING THE EXACT THING YOU TOLD ME ON THE PHONE?!?!
I never answer calls from numbers I don't know. I rarely listen to voice mails from the same. How often do important calls come from unknown numbers? In my case, never.
If its a business thing, and they don't have my email address, chances are we don't have any relationship that will lead to anything productive.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, to me it's a form of humblebragging. It's definitely a nice thing to be in high demand and 'complaining' about recruiters knocking down the door seems so arrogant and unaware.
The low quality spam I can do without, but it's never anything to whine about, filter and move on if it's a problem.
I like recruiters but I don't like the BS games. I think OPs creation is designed to cut through the BS and avoid wasting time. It really sucks to hear about a cool opportunity and set up a call to find out the pay is too low, the opportunity is at an undesirable company, or it simply isn't exactly what you were looking for. And all that happens because they try to withhold information until they get you on the phone and apply their sales tactics. OPs creation is an attempt to figure most of this out and weed out the recruiters that are just spamming and trying to get a warm body in a seat.
I'm not an engineer/developer but this happens in my area as well.
Recruiter spam has no correlation with expertise but more with your online profiles. Take linked in for example, when I had my real experience there (technologies used, etc) I got spammed a lot, but since changing all my profile to just contain the basic info (worked at X in year Y) just so I can connect with past workers, I get maybe 1-2 linked in spam emails a month. I assume if you have (or had since some recruiters scrape and store) filled your details in a job site (monster, cwjobs, etc) before, that rate will be a lot higher than if you just have a tech blog. Again, no relation with expertise, just online profile
Recruiters come in waves, I may have zero recruiters for two months then have 4-5 in a week. So sometimes its flattering after the 3rd or 4th of things that barely fit, its just "What do you want?"
The only recruiters I ever reply to are ones that state the company that they are representing. They tend to be local and actually trying.
99% is useless spam. I usually reply back with a copy/paste filling in blanks with their name to please give me more specific info about the position and salary range. Even that is too much to ask and they don't usually reply with the info.
I mean.. that's what they are doing, might as well do the same.
I don't mind emails from recruiters. I normally have enough info to know there is no reason to talk to them, and just delete the email without replying, and once in a while I'll respond if it does have promise. But nothing has yet pulled me away from my current gig.
The ones that I don't understand is the people who ask to connect on LinkedIn, with no explanation of who they are or why they want to talk to me. For those, I send a generic email telling them that if they want to say something to me, feel free to send an email. None ever have actually done so.
Title/position affects it significantly. When my title went from software engineer and manager to independent consultant (and later, CEO) it went way down because they usually don't want to deal with corp to corp consultants/firms.
Of course, I do occasionally get people pitching me for software development and staffing services, even though my profile clearly shows I do both. You can't avoid the robots and grossly incompetent.
I'm a Designer with some developer skills and I get spammed constantly for having things like "Javascript" et al on my profile.
My true developer friends seem to get it even worse. Around here, Java is the big need, so if you've got it on your profile, expect constant recruiter spam.
Heh, Java. I have well over a decade of experience using Java... to write cross-platform desktop applications using Swing. Turns out that's not the kind of Java experience most companies are looking for. :-)
There are a lot of Java jobs out there.not in startup-land but government and big fortune 500 firms wrote a lot of Java applications in the 90s and early 2000's that they are still maintaining. Also, because of this they will often write new applications in Java because that's what their in house developers who were hired to maintain old apps already know.
I worked on a java server application about 10 years ago and I get more recruiters contacting me about Java positions from that one item on my resume than I get from anything more recent or currently popular.
>> I worked on a java server application about 10 years ago and I get more recruiters contacting me about Java positions from that one item on my resume than I get from anything more recent or currently popular.
Drop it from your resume. Go ahead and leave the position and project description, but leave the language out.
I get a dozen emails a day from recruiters, sometimes more. I don't have time for the phone calls, I barely have time for the emails. If I get a particularly egregious one, like, say, for a PHP position or DBA, I go off on them because it's ridiculous.
I've been working for 15 years and get a lot of emails. OK, it's useful when I need a job, but about 1 in 30 is relevant. You know it's all keyword based, I haven't done Java for 8 years yet I get it all the bloody time!
Yeah, I don't get the hate for recruiters and find the attention flattering. A lot of my friends who are not in our industry find in foreign that I get so many emails and LinkedIn messages from headhunters on a weekly basis.
Further, when I respond to recruiters I tell them that I'm making a ton more then I am and in doing so, I get interviews where the offers are paying tons more then my current salary.
Why not use them to get a better deal? The majority of the notices you get go nowhere, while some do and you then get a new gig that pays you almost double from what you were making.
I do not get that many emails/contacts from recruiters, and I find a quick polite email exchange or one phone call allows to quickly clarify the situation and we're done.
I actually welcome recruiters contacting me, it keeps me in the loop of what's going, market rate etc... and sometime help me finding new gigs.
EDIT: It seems that where you are located makes a big difference. I get a few emails a week, almost zero spam. People in the bay area reports dozen of emails a day from robots based on keywords, that would indeed be frustrating.