Recruiter spam
Have a little fun with those “hard of hearing” recruiters
Everyone that has some online presence or just happened to end-up on some sort of list has had them: “Recruiter spam e-mails”. Now I don’t mind recruiters as such, everybody has to have a job. And clearly it pays off , the laws of natural selection dictate that.
But there are some agencies out there that are not looking for a perfect candidate to match that one specific job, they are more about using the shotgun approach. If you keep shooting long enough eventually a pellet will hit a target.
Those agencies don’t care about your happiness or what is good for their customers (talking about your happiness, you should watch this for some inspiration).
They just want to sell you to earn some money.
The trigger
So after receiving a job offer in Holland; I replied if remote would be an option, as I was living in Germany. The answers was no, so I replied that then I was not interested, this was well before I got the perfect remote job I currently have.
Of course, after saying “no thank you”, I never got a reply. That is the first hint to tell you what kind of recruiter you are dealing with.
Then, a week or so later, I got the same job description from the same recruiter again. I asked if remote work would be an option after all? This resulted in the same routine as the last time.
Then, about a week after that, you guessed it, I got the same job description from the same recruiter again.
I asked if he was “kidding me?”. he asked me why? I told him to “search your e-mail history”. No reply after that.
Fwd: Please@bouncethisemail.com
So, I created this super tiny and simple webservice; Bounce this email.
So, next time when you receive yet an other e-mail from a recruiter, someone you have asked not to send you anymore e-mails. Then you can just forward the e-mail to: please@bouncethisemail.com
This is routed to my service and it will parse the e-mail and craft a new e-mail that looks like as if the original e-mail was bounced because the e-mail account doesn’t exist.
This is just an example that I used, but you get the general idea.
Technical stuff
Because I am a geek and you probably as well; some technical details.
It is a simple Node.js app, with 2 routes. The home route which will give you a nice explanation when you hit it. And the route from which the app gets notified of new e-mails. This app is hosted on Heroku.
Then I have DNSimple for some smart e-mail forwarding.
And finally Mandrill that gets the forwarded e-mails and calls my receiving route with the e-mail as payload. I also use Mandrill to send the fake bounce e-mail back to the recruiter.
Easy peacy.
I am looking forward to hear your experiences with it!
