How recruiters spam the world [experiment with 2,500+ emails]
This article is about our experiment. We knew that recruiters were becoming more like spammers, but… bad news. Candidates (especially in the digital sphere) are buried in thousands of irrelevant letters, and it’s a real problem.
We conducted an experiment to prove this to the world — that recruiters are discrediting their profession and candidates are being forced to read copious amounts of irrelevant letters every day.
We also wanted to prove that even a false “developer” candidate can receive thousands of job proposals. We saw firsthand how the magic “Cntr C + Cntr V + {first name}” makes finding any really important letters in the inbox impossible.
So what we did.
Fake candidates
We created 13 fake developer accounts on LinkedIn. A few Full Stack Developers, a few Senior Developers, a few Front End Developers, and so on.
We waited for recruiters to detect all our perfect candidates and start writing letters. We asked them to send emails — to not use LinkedIn for sending job proposals via InMails. One month later we had 2.5 thousand letters and InMails (they didn’t read our profile very carefully, but what did you expect?) and a lot of data to work with.
Full Stack Developers can just lay down and cry, because they get more letters than everyone else — one of them got 411 letters.
One more curious fact: all our fake candidates had excellent job experience, but it was a complete lie. They worked at Airbnb, PayPal, Tesla, Booking, Amazon, and other tech companies, which claims none of the recruiters attempted to confirm. The Internet can be evil, but you can still check the facts, right?
Now, what you’re really wondering about: the content of the letters and the words recruiters use to talk to you.
The content of email masterpieces
_Letter subject_
We discovered that there are two types of recruiters.
The first type of recruiter makes sure that the main focus is the job title, and they include it in the letter subject. It’s true that the job title is pretty important, but it tells nothing about how relevant the job is to you or what the requirements are (you will see them listed inside!).
You will also likely see the word “opportunity.”
This usually means that the recruiter doesn’t know what the target of this position is exactly, but the word “opportunity” sounds pathetic enough. No target needed.
(Maybe they mean that you have an opportunity to become a java developer if you’ve always been working with java. Yes, they still often mix it.)
The next most common word in the letter subject is “urgent.”
Since when have recruiters decided that their burning deadline can somehow justify a bad letter? Should the candidate be rushed to make a decision?
One more word that makes our eyes cry — “hiring.”
Especially gifted recruiters also include the word “hiring” in the subject line. It’s very similar to newspaper publications, where the wanted ad is written in huge letters to attract the attention of the carpenter. But it’s 2018 now, and these recruiters are writing developers who receive 8–12 job proposals every day. Why still “hiring”?
The second type of recruiter is the type who reads a lot of blogs about creative writing and cold emails. That’s when we see something like this:
«Industry Rocker! Interested?»
«Quick Question»
«Have you ever been to Moon? We have!»
«HURRY!!! Telephone Interview»
To tell the truth, we did see a few letters from recruiters who are looking for rockstars, ninjas, jedis, and other mysterious creatures.
_Letter itself_
Here we also found a few rules that recruiters follow when writing an email.
Pretend that you are writing to the Queen of England in the 18th century.
Each 6th letter that we received began with the phrase, “I hope you are doing well.” Demonstrative politeness — that just drives us crazy and steals your time. “I hope you are doing well,” is an absolutely meaningless phrase. It seems recruiters believe that it immediately opens up a conversation with the candidate or shows that the recruiter is not indifferent. But it turns out quite the opposite.
The second thing that makes you want to scream is the desire to show that the candidate’s resume is the ninth wonder of the world. We saw about 100 letters that started with the phrase “your background impressed me.” Beware. Impressed recruiters may even faint when viewing your profile on Github.
Letters’ texts are built according to the Carly Rae Jepsen song template.
“Hi! I just met you and this is crazy but here is my number so call me maybe”
The phrase “I came across your profile” incredibly resembles “I just met you.” It’s basically the same thing. If the recruiter writes that he has seen your profile, he most likely did it inattentively and remembers zero details. He’s not ready to talk about your experience or education, but it seems to him that you are “a good fit” (every fourth recruiter finds this important to mention).
Recruiters still don’t know that it’s the candidates’ market now (maybe it’s time to tell them?)
You know yourself that the market is incredibly hot, but recruiters continue to ignore this fact and keep stamping letters, in most cases without receiving an answer.
Look at this comment from one of the Medium posts: “Is it wrong that I answered the recruiter’s letter and my heart was beating faster when I read it?”
Okay, recruiters, you’ve stressed the candidates to the point that replying to your letters is NOT COOL.
The genres of recruitment letter
Okay, it’s true that not all letters were completely the same, but that’s still not good news! There are 4 types of emails that recruiters use:
~Copy & Paste Me, Babe
You saw it already. Here’s the letter that has every cliche:
Hi, {{first name}}!
I hope you are doing well.
I just came across your profile on Linkedin and was impressed by your expertise. We are looking for qualified {{job title}}. We are a leading company in {{some sphere no one cares about}} You would make a great fit!Requirements:
- {{smth about tech stack}}
- {{smth about passion}}We have benefits. We have a growing team.
Share your resume and feel free to contact me.
Reach me out.Have a good day!
~You are my last chance
Usually, this kind of letters includes 2–4 “please”s and “urgent”s. Maybe recruiters really think that being polite increases their chances and they are trying to send you SOS signals. We don’t know.
Look at the ellipsis. Do you want to hear more about job opportunities?
One last try……
Dear recruiters, if your employer is exploiting you, send the code, “I hope you are doing marvelous.”
~I will find you and tell you about the job
Imagine that your phone is dead. Your mom is trying to reach you, so she sends you SMS messages on WhatsApp, but receives no answer. Your mom in this case is the recruiter. He won’t stop sending you emails everywhere.
~I know what you feel
A few recruiters tried to convince our fake candidates that they know about all the spam the developers are receiving:
I imagine you get an annoying amount of ‘recruiter’ emails; want to reiterate this is a much different ‘cold’ email.
Nice try, recruiter. You are trying to be friendly and understanding, but no. The letter was a little too personal, as the recruiter tried to mention as many details not related to job experience as possible. Even we believed that James wasn’t real.
p.s. that’s not creative.
Here is one more letter:
I know you probably get a bunch of irrelevant emails from recruiters, but I’m
reaching out to you specifically because of your skill set.
Some extraordinary things
Yes, we really received job-proposals in poems:
I have one position below if you are interested please let me know
And the last thing, that actually explains the name of our blog:
THE JOB OPPURTUNITY IS VERY HOT
Seems to us that it’s panic at recruitment.
P.S.
We actually found the way to stop recruiter spam. Here is the tool for making your own job proposal bot. You get the link, post it, and receive structured job proposals. The email storm may not be stopped immediately, but you won’t lose cool vacancies. Try it and tell us if it works for you.
