I push back on SPAM recruiter messages when I can.  The most common rebuttal I hear from recruiters is: “I don’t have time to customize outreach” or “It would be too time consuming to customize outreach”.

Why it’s nonsense: Let’s do The Math

Let’s presume Recruiting is a full time job.  That means you have 40 hours a week * 60 minutes = 2,400 minutes each week. Let’s liberally say a third is spent on meetings and overhead, another third on candidate or client screenings.  That leaves you with 2,400 / 3 = 800 minutes to build the top of your funnel.  Assume 2 or 3 open JDs at a time; If you’re reaching out to 200 candidates a week, that gives you 4 minutes per candidate!  And of course this all assumes you reach out to each candidate.  You won’t reach out to each candidate because if you skim everyone’s profile you’ll immediately disqualify 1/2 to 3/4 candidates!

The reason many recruiters spam is because of the unit-economics of spam work for THEM. Recruiters can get 10% of candidates to respond to their spray & pray messages.  That means that for 5 minutes investment in 200 spammy messages, a recruiter can get 20 leads.  (I’m assuming some investment has been made in outreach automation, as is standard in recruiting firms.)

On the other hand, let’s see what these unit economics look like with custom, personalized messages. Recruiters could double or triple their response rate by customizing their outreach.  If they discard 1/2 of the 200 person candidate pool upfront because they’ve done their research, they still send 100 messages, and get 30 leads.  But they just spent 100 x 2 minutes per candidate = 200 minutes on this candidate search.

If you are a recruiter, which do you choose?  Well, that depends on whether you want to externalize the damage that the spammy messages create.  The message causes collateral damage

• (1) to their reputation; and
• (2) to their clients reputation for the other 160 people they sent.
• We’ll also write off (3) the loss of candidate quality because the spammy messages do not self-select the top candidates, and
• (4) the loss of everyone’s time for having read these messages.

So the question is: Do you create damage to your clients reputation or degraet the quality of your search to save 200 – 5 = 195 minutes?

I suppose that depends on how long term your focus is.  I don’t know about you, but I refuse to work with people who view me as a *quick flip* or who don’t have my best interest at heart.

“I don’t have time” is just lazywebs for “It’s not worth my time”.  Don’t stand for it.  Say NO to recruiter SPAM.