[88913527]

The simplest way to detect recruiters reaching out to you without much thought is to use weird UTF8 characters in your LinkedIn name. The recruiter's message will be canned, but parameterized with your name. The parameterization gives you a means for communicating with yourself.

This fixes the problem for cold recruiter e-mails I get too, since they seem to scraping LinkedIn for contacts. You can change the character over time to have a sense of when they scraped the data, too.

[justusthane]

Seems like this has the potential for a high rate of false positives. If I were a recruiter typing out personal messages, I'd still likely copy and paste the name just to be sure I got it right.

[88913527]

Fortunately, you do have options for what will and won't get around the human filter, when it comes to choosing your weird character.

For example, a human knows that in name "John[Emoji] Doe", the [emoji] isn't likely a legitimate part of John's first name (imagine, if HN permitted, the emoji was a dolphin), whereas, "Renée Doe" a recruiter might copy-and-paste for accuracy.

[addandsubtract]

My personal filter is messages that read, "Hi [name], I love what you have done for [current company]..."

I develop B2B software in a niche market. How could you have possibly seen any of my work?

[darraghor]

yea nice! I do this too with an emoji in my linked name.