Ugh definitely. The awful thing is that they harvest your email from someone's address book and then bombard you with "people you may know" on your actual legitimate Linkedin account(tied into that email).
LinkedIn is a ghetto of recruiters looking for no benefit contract employees("Oh we see you are an EXTREME CUTTING EDGE WEB2.0 NINJA, would you like to take a $50k contract job?"). Does this work on anyone? I can't imagine any legitimate "superstars" actually respond to these folks.
Edit: the really awkward thing is when it starts recommending you one night stands from years ago just because you may have at some point exchanged an email.
I've always been puzzled by people who hate on recruiters contacting them through LinkedIn.
If you dislike it so much, why don't you delete your LinkedIn profile? It's obviously there to facilitate exactly this kind of behaviour, so I don't see why there's any issue around it.
To the contrary, I see these kinds of complaints as being a common form of humblebragging in the developer community. It comes across as: 'Gosh, isn't it tough being contacted by these recruiters all the time because my skills are under such high demand in the labor marketplace. Deleting that one email every few weeks sure does some serious damage to my psychological well-being.'
The substance of this article is about email spam generated by LinkedIn itself. I think we should focus on that, and on the broader issue of where the limits are for email invitations in web applications. The issue this has highlighted (for me at least) is that it is easy to do damage to the reputations for others by putting their names on emails they didn't ask to be sent. This doesn't just mean losing users, it actually means souring and sometimes ruining the valuable relationships that users have with their colleagues and friends. There's a lot of trust and power inherent when someone else's name is put on an email and that isn't something to be sneezed at.
I thought the purpose was to keep a list of professional contacts I know.
I don't expect to be contacted by recruiters I've never met before on an almost hourly basis during the week.
For my company, this is a genuine nuisance and most of our phone calls are from clueless recruiters offering candidates that don't even have the skills we're looking for.
Even if we needed a recruiter, I'd hardly choose one that called out of the blue. It's getting to the stage where we have to put warnings for recruiters not to contact us because we get so many it's harming our productivity.
So that's why I hate on it.
As an employer, I can say I've never had a good recruitment experience even outside of this situation.
However, I don't expect them to stop any time soon. If this is also a problem for anyone here, the best result is to quickly politely tell them you're not interested. Perhaps ask where they saw your details. Put a note there. Don't stay on the phone for the inevitable questions they've been trained to ask to keep you on the phone. Just say no if you value your time.
Just to follow on from this... perhaps to understand my acrimony, people from outside the UK might be interested to know that at times it seems as if we have an economy powered by an army of unskilled 'service sector professionals' calling the entire population trying to sell recruitment, utilities and PPI claims.
For many of us 'Were you mis-sold PPI?" is almost a daily question via SMS.
There's no way getting contacted by recruiters (most of whom aren't reputable if they've got to resort to cold contacting via Linked In) is humblebragging. It's a total pain in the ass and I shouldn't have to delete my linked in account just to prevent it happening. In fact, recruiters that abuse Linked in like this should have their accounts deleted.
Agreed. Complaining that you are spammed with potential job offers is like complaining about how expensive it is to replace the high-performance tires on your Porsche. Please don't forget that there is still high unemployment across the US and abroad.
Linked seems to be completely useless both for the jobless and for those with jobs. As an unemployed person I hope you can understand why I both don't delete my account and hate the spam.
While I have certainly had my share of clueless recruiters contact me through LinkedIn, I have also had a good number of decent contacts that either didn't pan out or which I just wasn't interested in. I don't get nearly the deluge of contacts that some people here say they get, though.
I'm pretty early career(graduated in 2012) and even I get harassed on the regular. Maybe they bother younger people more because they think we're less expensive(which is generally true) but the only "legit" linkedin recruiters I ever heard from seemed like Google/FB/Palantir/etc"spam every graduating CS kid in x region" as an invitation to apply rather than a normal "recruiting for a specific opening" type thing.
Maybe I just have a shitty linkedin(but it does say plz no recruiters on it)
You probably should develop a different attitude for you own benefit.
You are just starting out and the shit recruiter today may very well progress in their career (perhaps they are even a newbie to recruiting) and you may need them down the road.
Even if annoying, no sense to burn bridges. You can always be polite and keep the door open. Your job prospects may be good today but not in 5 or 10 years.
As far as "harassed" welcome to the world of outbound selling. If you were out of a job and were sending out resumes and contacting potential employment prospects how would you like if they said that you were "harassing" them?
I disagree. You're anonymous to these guys, you're just another possible lead. When you're further down the road, these guys will continue to try any means to talk to you no matter what - even if you write 'Recruiters - Please don't contact me' all over your profile.
It's not a sincere relationship at all - they're just trawling through their latest LinkedIn Premium search.
This is definitely true. I don't think I burn bridges(and the statement on linkedin isn't "no recruiters pls" it's more like "I am happily employed"). I don't angrily reply or anything.
Also sure I wouldn't like it if people said I was harassing them with my resume, but I wouldn't be. These people send the same posts over and over to the same people(who, by their linkedin are clearly employed).
I have no idea if they're good at recruiting, I just don't want another job.
(and the statement on linkedin isn't "no recruiters pls" it's more like "I am happily employed")
I have no idea if they're good at recruiting, I just don't want another job.
Right now. Ten years is a long time, though. There's also a good chance you'll be a completely different person in five. And since your employer has no loyalty to you whatsoever, you may be looking for a new job in even less time.
There's no possible downside in letting recruiters email you.
"There's no possible downside in letting recruiters email you."
Totally agree. Over the years I've seen many variations of this. "serious inquiries only" used to be a staple of some classifieds back when people did classified. Essentially people that don't want to be bothered because all they are thinking about is today and what their own needs are. (Of course I don't like to be bothered either and draw the line at certain things as well in some cases of course - I guess it's just where the line is).
One thing I picked up in "this business" back in the 90's was that seemingly important people (VC's for example) wanted to talk to everybody and anybody since they never knew going forward who might be the next star out of the newbies.
I think there's something at play with when you're "looking". I didn't update anything to specifically say that I was in the market for a new job, but when I was, I was receiving a shitload of emails. Now that I switched jobs and I'm happily employed for about a year I only get like one every couple weeks. Not sure what kind of algorithm they use but it's pretty good.
> I can't imagine any legitimate "superstars" actually respond to these folks.
Well, of course not. The goal isn't to get those people. It's to get the people who aren't that good but are just good enough and therefore are actually awed by having someone contact them and refer to them as an extreme cutting edge web 2.0 ninja.
I don't know if that kind of contact works, but I have gotten a very well-paying full-time, full-benefits job through LinkedIn. I hate their spamming practices, but I do find the site useful.
I've been contacted through LinkedIn by several uninteresting recruiters, but also directly by many big names in tech for seemingly high quality jobs. There's good and there's bad on LinkedIn, but it certainly isn't worthless. By now it has the market penetration to be very difficult to replace, and it could be made great if it were just a little less annoying.
I agree with you about Linkedin for computer jobs, but monster.com and the other job sites are the same way. When I post an updated resume on monster.com, I have scummy recruiters calling me the very next day. So that's not a Linkedin problem, it's a shitty recruiting/hiring in the IT world problem.
I don't think it's so bad for other professions, though. My girlfriend has found a job through her Linkedin contacts, and a friend of mine who does sales has found a job through his network there, too.
Facebook does the exact same thing. I keep getting their spam and I don't have an account so they pester me to sign up. Incredible that such big companies get away with this. Even google has joined the legion of spammers with their new 'g+ linkdrive'.
The really terrible thing is how hard it is to get those contacts OUT of the system. The best part is once you figure out how, they only let you delete 100 at a time (odd they had the capability to upload more than that at once). Just spent an hour last week doing this.
I got my current job, which is pretty good, from an agency cold-calling me via linkedin.
But I'm not a superstar.
That said, it's been infuriating trying to figure out why or where I might know all those "you may knows." And I never contact anyone who contacts me via linkedin, unless they write something non-robotic in the message, because I assume it's a linkedin bot sending messages to an uploaded contact list.
I'm working with my employer (a consulting firm) to try and build a solution to this issue. We're trying to keep recruiters out of the loop and place value directly on contractors.
Keep your eye out this weekend, we're going to go live and leave another post here.
Not my experience. 90% of the recruiters who contact me (and I get a lot of mail) are for genuine, decent paying contract work - usually in the EUR450-500 day rate range.
You have to ignore the obnoxious stuff you don't like with LinkedIn and just treat it as a tool.
LinkedIn is a classic example of how a company must shift from serving their customer to serving their investors after they go public.
They used to be a very useful service.[1] But the closer they got to their IPO the more the started doing things that were clearly in the best interest of generating more page views regardless of how valuable those things were to their users. To my mind this lawsuit was brought about because of that very behavior.
1: Not accounting for the recruiters who have plagued it. Something LinkedIn could probably deal with but they don't want to because that would affect page views.
Presumably they try to drive up page views in order to make more revenue. Are you saying that they wouldn't do the same if they were still privately held?
Maybe after their IPO the thought is that they're no longer going to get magical money raining down on them, so they actually have to try to generate more profit?
Although it must be hard for people with option grants when there's a P/E approaching 1000 and you need the price to keep going up to do well.
I'm saying they drive up page views in ways that are independent of the value those things provide to their users.
I'm not against increasing revenue. I'm against scanning my contacts list without my permission so they can invite my friends. What value does this provide to me? None. What value does it provide to them? A ton because if even a small percentage of my contacts signs up then LinkedIn has just increased page views and thus, revenue.
Pretty clearly stated in the comment you are replying to.
Investment Bankers care about pageviews. Valuations are driven by operating metrics when financial metrics alone cannot support a valuation at desired levels. Since linked-in executives get a cut of the IPO proceeds (directly or indirectly), the logical link follows that "the company" cares about these things. Or at least they did in the context of pre-IPO window dressing.
Hope that LinkedIn lose that suit. I had tonnes of people with me in their address book bombarding me with LinkedIn invitations - it'd make me feel better about that.
My favorite LinkedIn feature is how invitations are not sent by linkedin.com, but your friend/colleague/etc. This way, marking it as spam doesn't hurt them.
I had to go through several rounds of customer support to get my information off of their site. "You don't have an account" they would repeat - of course I don't, which is why it bothers me that I still get invitations and show up in your "recommended" lists.
There's protections against this sort of thing that major isps implement. You can't just set your from address to whatever you want. Well you can, but it would be likely be rejected, or at least wouldn't reach your target's inbox.
SPF allows you to fake the From header, so long your Return-Path is your own domain and passes checks. DMARC can pass if SPF passes. To end users, there's no discernible difference when there's another Return-Path domain.
DKIM does allow you to force the From header to be signed, so hopefully that'll continue to pick up steam. It does break some things, like some mailing lists, and that probably contributes to why it's taken so long to get such things going. There's also a lot of "business critical" software out there that just assumes it can send as any user.
It depends on how the spam-filtering is implemented, but mark-as-spam should still hurt them in a well-designed system. The 'From' is set to the person in question, but the envelope sender is correctly identified as LinkedIn (or else the mails would often fail SPF checks), and you can filter based on that.
While Koh agreed to throw out claims based on federal wiretap and stored communications claims, she said LinkedIn may have violated California’s right of publicity, which protects against the appropriation of someone’s name or likeness, without their consent, for commercial purposes.
From the article I understand the suit is by LinkedIn members whose contact book was (in their opinion) abused to send these invitation emails to non-members. On the face of it that's a reasonable claim and seems they should prevail.
But also: How about the recipients -- who are getting repeated unsolicited commercial emails? How does this activity not violate CAN-SPAM? Shouldn't LinkedIn be subject to fines?
Edit: Although I don't terribly mind the downvote, especially if it was accidental -- I did read the whole article and had a genuine question.
I logged into Linkedin recently for the first time in a while, and I was APPALLED to find that they had suggested the psychiatrist I saw during college for depression as a contact. They must have mined out her contacts info. This stuff is extremely sensitive and should be confidential, but Linkedin totally disregards that.
For anyone talking about receiving too much LinkedIn spam it was revealed to me on HN that they actually have a do not contact list. I sent them an email listing off my email addresses a little while ago and they've honoured it.
This same process did not work for me, at all. My dead relatives I emailed years ago are always in my recommendation list. I never connected to an external account, and have repeatedly tried to contact linkedin with no response. I'll gladly be a counterparty to this suit.
Linked-In used to put up a message wanting to "verify" my email address and ask for a password. I made it a point to never ever give them my email password because I thought they'd help themselves. Anyone know if they do? I also gave my linked-in account it's own password in case they might try do something crappy like trying to get at my email assuming its the same password. It's not just them, half the apps on Google Play want access to my contacts, texts, and/or location - stuff the app itself has no use for.
I'd appreciate if they let me unsubscribe from their damn emails on a catch all account where I get a former employee's emails. They make you log-in to opt out and I'm not about to reset the guy's password in case he still uses linkedin.
They don't make you log in. Use this form [1] and they'll blacklist your email address system-wide [2]. Be sure to include any spelling variations (e.g. an optional dot) that may be in your contacts' address books:
Please add my email addresses to the Do Not Contact List:
andrew@example.com
and.rew@example.com
throwaway@example.com
Thank you,
Andrew
I did this in April and haven't since received anything but a confirmation from their customer support.
I used to be on LinkedIn, but deleted my profile a year and half ago. I still get e-mails about invitations from people who know me, and whenever I choose to unsubscribe from them, I still get them.
The scary thing is that when you click through the link to confirm, they used to ask you to 'change a password' implying that a ghost account in your name already exists. I just checked it now, and it just offers me to create an account instead.
I had to create a rule in gmail. Marking them as spam didn't seem to work too well and still a lot slipped through. Now anything that has linkedin.com in subject, from, to, and body is automatically deleted.
Maybe, but to be honest, haven't had one complain of not replying to emails yet (Except from recruiters).
Maybe I'm just not involved in a lot of circles with folks that do that (looking at signatures of most of my emails, most just have name, email and phone)
I don't know how many times I've accidentally sent emails to random people asking them to join LinkedIn because the button looks like the one for connecting with someone already on the site, two different things.
LinkedIn is a ghetto of recruiters looking for no benefit contract employees("Oh we see you are an EXTREME CUTTING EDGE WEB2.0 NINJA, would you like to take a $50k contract job?"). Does this work on anyone? I can't imagine any legitimate "superstars" actually respond to these folks.
Edit: the really awkward thing is when it starts recommending you one night stands from years ago just because you may have at some point exchanged an email.