[hinkley]

I marked myself as passively looking on LinkedIn recently and it’s been depressing.

Now I get that only a certain type of recruiter is out there contacting people but it’s a little unsettling how little information people are providing about the companies. Am I interested? Are you being serious? How would I even know?

If there’s something wrong with me for wanting to know more than two bits of information about a company before I start a conversation, then I don’t wanna be right.

[mseebach]

Have you tried actually asking for that? It is counterproductive (and a bit arrogant) to assume that other people, especially strangers, are able to deduce what aspects of a job you care about.

My observation is that the recruiters cold-emailing me will generally be heavy on emphasising cool new tech, the opportunity to influence the stack at a greenfield project etc etc, which I don't really care about, I want to work on an interesting real world problem and have a chance of having some impact - the tool chain doesn't matter, if COBOL is the right tool for the job, I'll bloody well learn COBOL.

But nothing in my profile says this. So my analysis is that what I'm getting is what a recruiter thinks an average person with roughly my profile cares about, and thinking about it, it's probably not very wrong.

[hinkley]

Your experience is pretty similar to mine I think.

Doesn’t it bother you that the pitch is so... amoral? As first impressions go it makes me pretty uncomfortable.

Hey we use ML and are growing quickly, come work with us. I’ve gotten that one three times. One of them was an ad network. Another was ‘disrupting’ some large industry that we all use every day but wouldn’t say what. The third I still have no idea.

[mseebach]

No, doesn't bother me. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that when I want to look for a new job, the onus is on me to articulate what I want to do, and in the meantime, the cold emails give me a bit of intelligence into what's stirring out there. As for morality, different people feel differently about different things. I have nothing against adtech or hedge funds (that's what they try to recruit me for) per se, but that's not to say I'd be excited about working on it. Again, a recruiter can't tell from a sparse LinkedIn profile what I may or may not care about.