Ask HN: I am getting submerged by low-effort Indian headhunters on LinkedIn? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I am getting submerged by low-effort Indian headhunters on LinkedIn?

9 pointsLdorigo8 comments

I recently got back on the job market and started being active on LinkedIn. Until recently I received regular (1-2/week) high-quality recruiter messages on LinkedIn, which I think matches the experience of most tech workers.

For the last few days, I have been submerged (5-6 messages/day) by extremely low-effort messages which share the following characteristics:

- Fairly relevant to me but don't match my experience level at all (I'm junior/mid-level and they are all for senior level) - All from Indian (or Indian-sounding, might be pakistani/bengali?) people/companies but for local (European) roles - Very poorly written - The two I tried having a phone call were very hard to understand and utterly wasted my time (told me after 20 minutes of conversation that the role required 10 years experience, uhm you could have read my CV and saved us both the waste of time?)

Any idea where this comes from? How do you react to this (I'm afraid to pass over good opportunities if I just ignore them)?

* Being around the end of the month during a troubling economic period in the tech industry I'd explain the increase in random messages by guessing that lot of low-level recruiting shops are desperately trying to meet some arbitrary quotas.

* Not saying you can't ever find a job with them, but these kinds of recruiters are almost always bad communicators, pushy, disrespectful of social norms, have questionable motives, barely understand anything about the tech they're recruiting for to the point of even getting the names of technologies they're looking for wrong, and are rarely worth dealing with.

> these kinds of recruiters are almost always bad communicators, pushy, disrespectful of social norms, have questionable motives, barely understand anything about the tech they're recruiting for to the point of even getting the names of technologies they're looking for wrong, and are rarely worth dealing with.

This also reflects on the company they're recruiting for. It's unlikely that they are any better at negotiating with their own clients (if they were capable of good comms, why not also do that for candidates?), so if the company itself sees nothing wrong with that then it's definitely not a place you want to work at.

Just speculating out loud, but in some cases, having a recruitment process that fails might be the goal.

Some manager might want a recruitment process to fail to promote their favored internal candidates, or to justify going the H1B route.

To do that, you might need a horrible recruitment process that is repellent to the best job candidates that fails so your desired outcome happens.

Think you hit the nail with your "end of the month quotas" explanation - messages dropped back to usual amounts on September 1st !

I get those. Just take them for what they are, low-quality recruiter messags. Maybe some of them will pan out, but most-likey, it won't.

They are probably finding you via Linkedin. If you had submitted a resume to one of them at some point, they will contact you again for a job remotely similar to something that you do.

Have you changed your profile in any way? I wonder if there's some specific low-quality keyword that makes your profile show up in their searches.

Just ignore imo

Probably needs the weekly dose of validation.

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