Blatant Employee Poaching on LinkedIn?

The other day I made a fake LinkedIn to test out some features on a website I was working on. I made an account named “John Smith” who was a Software Engineer at Google. The account didn’t have a picture or any connections. I was extremely surprised and immediately laughed when I got an email notification the next day with this message:

“Doing interesting things in your current role at Google”? LOL no idea how you would get that impression considering I had absolutely no description of the “interesting things” I was doing in my “current role at Google”. I figured LinkedIn had to just be sending these automated messages to any new accounts that are working at Google.

But then I wondered what other companies LinkedIn was sending these kind of messages to. So I made four more accounts that worked at Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. Again all of them had absolutely no information (no picture, description, etc) except their role as a “Software Engineer at X”. All of them except the one at Apple got this message:

An immediate offer for “a brief, confidential chat”. Making accounts like this is probably the most effective way to apply to LinkedIn.

I thought that was it. But then just 30 minutes later my accounts at Facebook and Microsoft got this message:

The Microsoft one also got this invite from a Googler:

tl:dr; Companies are shamelessly poaching. Not that poaching is bad (we don’t want no-poach agreements), but it’s just pretty incredible how blatant it is.

Also no one cares about Apple employees?