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Comment by andrewzeno

2 hours ago

My email is filled with junk from cybersecurity "experts" telling me that my open source project is "very compromised" and that they will gladly reveal to me what the issue is, if I commit to paying them a bug bounty. I get at least a few every week. I hate them, but I feel like we are well past the point where in any place where there is money to be made, the majority of cold outreach will be from semi-personalized AI agents. You just have to accept that most of the time your get contacted by someone, it is likely not a human.

59 comments

andrewzeno

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chrismorgan  2 hours ago

Whether it helps or not—the typical contact like this hasn’t been a human for decades now. What I’m seeing these days is materially almost identical to what went out ten years ago. Basic form letter with a cover sentence or paragraph of either no relevance, or a tenuous but normally ill-researched claim at relevance.

  • insane_dreamer  1 hour ago

    yeah; just that we'll get 5x of these now that it's even easier to generate more "real-human-sounding" ones.

    IMO, the best way to deal with these, if using gMail, is not marking them as spam. Instead, I drag them into the Promotions tab, answer "yes" to classify all emails from the subject as such, and that's it. Promotions == Trash.

    I don't open/read such emails (I scan the first few words shown in the Inbox line, then dispense), so good luck trying to cold contact me for legitimate purposes.

dheera  2 hours ago

Reminds me of all the recruiters who reach out to me saying they're working on filling some engineer position but never say the company name, and when asked, they want to have a call.

Stop wasting my time, STATE THE COMPANY UPFRONT AND AT THE TOP, preferably in the subject line

  • Cthulhu_  1 hour ago

    This is not in the recruiter's interest though, because you may just go past them and apply to the company directly, so they miss out on their revenue.

    I love picking apart a recruiter's emails, in a handful of cases I see the advert and I'm like "Oh yeah I used to work there". Go and React in a telecom company in NL near where I live? Yeah I set that up. No I don't want to go back, not unless they hire an actual team.

    • dsr_  1 hour ago

      Every recruiter I have dealt with (on the hiring side) has had a provision in the contract: if they have a documented exchange with a candidate whom we hire during or within (a month, two months...) of the contract end, the recruiter is deemed to have done the work. Contrarily, if we have a documented exchange with a candidate before the recruiter does, the recruiter is not owed anything.

      So: the recruiter has an incentive to mention the hiring company as soon as they get a response from you.

      If they don't do that, they are either bad at writing contracts or don't actually have authority to recruit. Mostly the second: you would not be surprised at the number of cold emails I get saying that they represent a candidate (or a pool of candidates) who are exactly right for the position that we filled last month.

      1 reply →

    • WorldMaker  24 minutes ago

      My favorite was the game of trying to figure out if multiple recruiters were trying to forward me to the exact same job/hiring company and trying to get them to stop stepping on each other's toes and try to a pick a "winner" recruiter for that specific role.

      It's a weird thing to miss, but this layoff cycle so far I haven't seen any recent recruiter emails at all, which seems strange on multiple levels.

  • ajkjk  1 hour ago

    I message them back and inform them I am reporting their message as spam. Seems to get a reaction.

  • lousclues  1 hour ago

    It seems like all paths with recruiters lead to the phone call. I really wish some of them had an email only option.

    • gmueckl  1 hour ago

      Email only is not a good option for them. They need candidates that aren't at least a total embarrassment when presented to their clients, so the phone call really is a first screening interview.

    • philipallstar  30 minutes ago

      > I really wish some of them had an email only option.

      But why? If they need to convince someone you're a good hire, they will want to talk to you.

  • Nuzzerino  2 hours ago

    That stopped being super frustrating for me about a year ago. Wishing it were the other way though…

  • noitpmeder  2 hours ago

    They can't, otherwise a significant fraction of the people they reach out to would just skip the head hunter and contact the company directly.

    Same reason these same head hunters will usually strip any direct-contact details out of your resume before sending on to companies -- they don't want those companies running around them and contacting the candidate directly.

    IMO, these people are all grifters and uses-car-salesman. Their goal is to get as many people as possible to use them to change jobs so they get bonuses. They provide little-to-no value add in the actual process and will actively try to shovel you toward shitty companies and dead-end roles, despite how well they dress them up.

    You are ~20-50%~ cheaper (typical is 30% IIRC) in the first year of your employment if you are a direct hire instead of going through a recruiter, from a hiring manager's perspective. If you switch jobs often this compounds to make your offer chances lower as well if you're going through a head hunter (I've been part of these discussions from hiring side).

    • satvikpendem  2 hours ago

      Not exactly. Recruiters often can guarantee an interview with the hiring manager while if you submitted your resume to the company directly, you'll just get lost in the sea of resumes so not much point going around them. I also always give them a PDF resume and I'm pretty sure they don't edit them as sometimes during a video interview the employer pulls up my resume as a screen share to go through it and it's always been the exact one I've had with all my personal contact details.

      It's simply not worth it for either the employer and interviewee to go around the recruiter because they act as a filter for both sides initially.

      5 replies →

    • mrkstu  2 hours ago

      Depends- my current position was via a staffing firm that was engaged directly by my new company to fill the position, since they had an existing trust relationship.

      But they indeed were comfortable revealing the hiring company early in the process due to that trust level…

    • rgbrgb  1 hour ago

      fwiw my experience building a small tech talent agency / recruiting shop disagrees with this. Cold application pipelines are overwhelmed by gen AI applications and many of the (very qualified) candidates we place report getting totally ghosted on all cold applications - even when we’re able to get them several interviews a week with companies in our network.

      Seems like companies still value a curated pipeline. 15-20% of first year salary (numbers we see these days) appears to be worth saving the company time interviewing unscreened candidates. Recruiting can be a real time suck and a bad hire can be catastrophic.

    • dheera  2 hours ago

      I can't get interested in a job without knowing who the people behind it are, and what the actual mission of the company is.

      Recruiters say things like "autonomous robotics systems"

      For what? Weapons? Hell no. Doing dangerous industrial jobs humans shouldn't be doing? Hell yes.

    • LightBug1  2 hours ago

      Or they don't have a job opening at all and are just looking to bolster the database.

      I remember the annual cycle back in the day. During quieter times of the year, I'd suddenly get a tonne of calls from various recruiters with a job (no company name) ... almost as if they'd been told, "ok, no one's hiring or placing right now, no point you sitting there on your arse while I pay you. So pick up the phone and get some qualified leads"

  • at-fates-hands  1 hour ago

    The easy way to get around this is by telling the recruiter you've been actively applying with companies inside your state and for remote contract work and you don't want to be submitted twice.

    They'll send over the company name right away.

  • cruffle_duffle  1 hour ago

    Paste the job description into your friendly LLM and let it attempt to find the company for you and then contact the company itself.

    Those recruiter spams generally just copy and paste the companies own JD so the LLM can usually figure out the source company.

cyanydeez  2 hours ago

this is what a pi based LLM is great for; give it it's own email address, then say something like "I'm intrigued, please talk to my security expert, CC'd" and cc the pi.