Why Is LinkedIn Full of Poor Recruiters?

With greatly low unemployment in the IT sector, developers have total control over their careers. Thus, employers are fighting each other to show them something more than just a plain job offer. And hither came recruiters, a fundamental part of the hiring process. Their sole goal is to find great candidates, check them out, and send a qualified selection to the hiring manager.

Those people should try their best to get the attention of candidates, doing research, checking their profiles, finding the best matches for the role they are hiring for, developing trust, and impressing them before they even come for a screening interview.

Or are they not?

I work in IT and have a decent LinkedIn profile. Every week I get several messages about open positions. I did my best to respond in a very professional way, regardless of whether the job fits my skill. Over the years, however, recruiter spam has become my biggest pain point with LinkedIn. Having received dozens of generic-looking messages and subject lines like “I’m filling XYZ position” or “Wonderful career opportunity”, I started wondering how these people can successfully deliver a good-fitting candidate with this decidedly inconvenient approach after all…

LinkedIn has become a database for recruiters, giving them access to all talents worldwide at the click of a button. Many of those have chosen a “shotgun approach” to fill up their contact database. They have built a mindset that if they send enough messages, they will always get some results. This discerns mere recruiters from Talent Acquisition Managers.

So, why bother with putting an additional effort into personalization and honesty? Perhaps because it’s not worth the effort, perhaps it’s because the companies they are working for are not pushing for these qualities which means that nobody will hold them personally responsible for how they do their job. As a result, top candidates are swamped, getting hundreds of messages daily, most of them being just recycled templates.

Just very rarely do I hear colleagues talking about a positive experience with LinkedIn recruiters. On the other hand, many people I know got their best jobs from recruiters contacting them out of the blue on LinkedIn. As such, it’s not that contemptible, yet it’s not easy either to filter out the bad ones and focus on promising messages.

Some recruiters are even so predictable that I can identify them by their messages sent to other people. I can recognize the buzzwords, the same signature mistakes, and sloppy practices.

Real-life examples

Here are several real-life messages I’ve encountered over the past few years:

“…hope you are well? Keen to have a phone meeting because I’m working on a number of Java developer roles…”

Obviously, someone from a hiring agency. Why should I bother? Besides, do I have Java in my tech-stack? No. This person didn’t even read my profile.

Me: “That’s definitely not my tech stack…”

Agency HR Manager: “Does not matter. Let’s give it a try and perhaps you will pass :)”

Well… that’s the problem with recruitment agencies. On their websites, they toss around phrases like “We provide the best-fitting, high quality candidates to our clients,” while doing the exact opposite — they quickly screen your CV, send you to a few companies and hope that one of them will take you on.

“Hi. I’m looking for IT professionals for [company A] and [company B]. I would like to add you to my contact list for future cooperation.”

At least she honestly admitted “I don’t have anything for you, but I would like to put you to my contact list”. This person treats people like a pool of resources and each successful hire as a single transaction.

“…I’m looking for Java developers that develop web applications in Vue.JS…”

This person doesn’t have the slightest comprehension of what is she looking for. VueJS is a JavaScript library and Java is to JavaScript as ham is to hamster. She should have asked her manager to review her template.

“Hi, are you interested in working for a big company with around 100k employees? We use NodeJS, Java, ASP.NET and much more!”

Another hiring agency. Not mentioning the name of the company, it’s possible that they are just hiring for several big companies, hence the wide tech stack. Besides, concerning 100k employees, good luck becoming 100001st. You are gonna disappear in the employee number list.

“Hi I’m [name], working for [company]. We are developing [software] and this is our tech stack. Is it something that could be of some interest to you?”

No personal notes, just plain content, describing the company and the tech stack. What if I wanted to know something about company culture? This person should have discovered what topics I’m interested in while reading my profile.

“Good morning [name], what do you enjoy the most about your current employment? Good day.”

This recruiter is either insane or a genius. This message wasn’t sent to me but if it was, I would reply just out of pure curiosity as I would like to know how this dialog would advance.

“I would love to tempt you in to an exploratory conversation, so thought I’d share some cool facts about [company]:
We’re valued at over $10 billion
We now have more than 3000 employees
You get to work with the global trend-setter in FinTech. You get to influence how we build out a new engineering hub in Milan.

Okay. It’s nice to be valued at $10 billion, but do they have stock options? No. Moreover, they were looking for new developers for their new engineering hub in Milan, with no relocation budget and a mediocre salary. I applied to find out how things will work out. The interview was very challenging — IQ tests, graph theory, linear algebra, a little bit of JavaScript, questions like “What would you do if XYZ”, etc. Yet, they weren’t even able to answer my questions on company culture, budget for education, or retention practices.

“Hi there, it’s [name] here, you look like you may be perfect for an opportunity I have to identify a Super Guru for a very prestigious client based in [city].

… Looking for a creative, innovative, inventive, visionary and resourceful enthusiast….

… the main skills must include an absolute rock star/demi-god/genius of all things RestAPI, Python & AWS! …“

OK, this is just a copy-paste, yet it makes its point. It’s written in a friendly way and what is more, it suggests that some minimum effort was put in sending this message only to fitting candidates. Not bad, not outstanding.

“Hello [name]. I hope you’re great. I’ve just discovered your profile and what got my attention was your github repo… especially the XMPlayer for synth music processing. Are you still into those things? We are looking for a few impeccable technocrats — interactive applications, sound processing ,… stuff like this. I can’t promise I have a spot-on role for you but from what I have observed, it would be definitely worthy of a chit-chat.”

This message got my attention thanks to its personal touch. This person at least checked out my Github profile.

Practices of good recruiters

Good recruiters understand what you want and what their company wants. Moreover, they understand the role they are trying to hire for. They must know their stuff inside out and won’t mix up Java with JavaScript or other slip-ups.

Good recruiters won’t say “I have gone through your profile thoroughly”, they will rather demonstrate it by referring to your personal achievements. I set up my profile in such a way that if someone admits he/she has read my profile, I can instantly find out by the content. Which pointed me to the fact that 85% of recruiters who had contacted me were lying.

Good recruiters do their research. They check out your profile, look at your social media sites, read your blog, and check your published posts. They put in the effort to get to know you, before even wasting your time by sending you a message. And when they do, they won’t just say “your experience is impressive”. They will mention what exactly is impressive and why.

Good recruiters will detect your attitude from your profile. There are several groups of engineers — those that want to work on world-changing projects that could give them a sense of accomplishment, another group that cares more about the environment and the community, and the last group that only wants to get the job done, being mostly interested in the tech-stack. The responsibility of the recruiters is to detect, based on your profile, what data you are interested in and adjust the content of the message accordingly.

Good recruiters go for quality over quantity. They will know which roles you will be more suited to than others. They don’t make decisions just by a few keywords spotted in your profile — they would rather find 10 prefect-hit candidates and reach them out in a resourceful way than just blast 100 “maybe” candidates.

Good recruiters always follow up. I have encountered many recruiters who get in touch but never follow up. If they don’t it’s a sign that their business is not in order.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for recruitment if used thoughtfully. Sadly, many recruiters abuse it, they don’t do justice to their role by a long road, tarnishing the ones who care about their reputation and put some additional effort. It’s extremely easy to be a terrible recruiter, but much harder to be a good one, though.

I’m pretty sure there are great recruiters out there who really understand the roles, who read your profile before contacting you and evaluate it.

I’m pretty sure there are amazing recruiters that do care about you and do their best to commit.

So, why are those bad recruiters still in business? Because it’s still paying off. Unless there is a rating system on LinkedIn, they will still be able to convince enough people to apply for a job. In this process, however, they put the trust of those candidates in jeopardy, and do great harm to the reputation of those truly great recruiters.

On the other hand, what can the candidates do? Ignore the bad ones and don’t make connections with them. Focus on the good ones, even though they might not have a fitting job for you. You can help them find an appropriate candidate from your own network.

So, if you happen to be a recruiter, having read this article, are you a good one or a bad one?