Recruitment is Good; Common Recruiter Tactics Are Bad.
There truly is market value in helping folks find new careers. Technical recruiters have the potential to be the grease in the wheel of the new economy, to help people achieve better, bigger, things with their skills; To uplevel their salaries, to life them out of poverty. And to help companies uplevel their teams and their products.
But if one separates the *tactics* from the *endgame* of technical recruitment, a lot is left to be desired. Mainly because of the SPAMMY copy/paste and spray and pray tactics employed by many in technical recruiting. The valueless middlemen are everywhere, and they generate negative results for prettymuch everyone but themselves (are their clients and engineers the customer or the product?).
It’s a well known fact in engineering circles that spray and pray marketing messages from recruiters are a dime a dozen in a hot market. As an senior engineer in a hot market, you may get a half dozen, maybe a dozen, recruitment messages per week. The annoyance/time itself spent dealing with this issue is negligible on a per-person basis. So why is it worth the time to make a stink if you get a copy/paste recruitment message?
Because if you don’t turn down spammy messages and you don’t educate recruiters that what they are doing is a turn off, the market economics incentivizing their behaviour will never go away.
This is what cold recruitment emails should look like. Next time a recruiter sends you a message but clearly didn’t target their outreach to you specifically, tell them you expected more.