Recruiters are getting vile. Recently one contacted a friend and told my buddy that I had referred him. My buddy hit me up after the call mad that I'd told a recruiter he was looking.
I'd never met the recruiter but he'd added me on LI at some point in the past.
Be thankful that jobs search for you and not the opposite.
Should we be thankful that there are lots of realtors? We should be thankful there is enough real estate and the price is accessible (at least for some of us). Realtors are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
I liken it to web ads. The worst web ads will attempt drive-by downloads or are simply obnoxious -- loud, obtrusive, clickjacking, forced-redirects, autoplayed video on pay-per-bandwidth connections, ill-designed for different form-factors, badly layered under/over content. Then again, some ads are perfectly tailored, unobtrusive, small, and fast. Most people generally don't complain about the latter. They don't install AdBlockers to avoid the latter. But the latter are collateral damage of people avoiding the former.
> how lucky they are for being stalked by recruiters
This is not costless. I stopped answering my phone because it was causing context switches while at work and affecting my productivity. Eventually I figured out that I needed to unsubscribe from recruiter lists (some of which were probably email-confirmation spam traps) and to completely obfuscate my job search profiles while I was not searching.
How does your opinion differ from the statement above?
But let's ignore the analogy for a moment. If someone is annoyed by something, it is not less genuine because others would not be annoyed by it.
The former (speaking of recruiters targeting modern technology professionals; 19th century naval recruiters are a different story) has less of a history of escalating to physical violence and forced taking of what is desired by the pursuer, a context difference which results in a significant difference in the level of reasonably perceived threat to autonomy and physical safety involved.
The "sexy" jobs are not chasing you, just like the sexy people aren't usually the ones that become stalkers.
It was kind of flattering until I realized most of them never works for me.
They'll call, ask a lot, ask me to submit a cv although my updated profile is already on LinkedIn. They'll ask about salary expectations and then I won't hear from them again.
(BTW: Yes, I walk from one nice job to the next, can't complain. But I've found that for me talking to recruiters is pointless most of the times. FTR: I got my current job through a recruiter, first time in ten years I actually got a job through a recruiter.)
They also don't do any curation. The majority that most engineers deal with are cold calling hoping that the buzzword soup overlaps enough.
Glorified telemarketers.