Dear Linked-In Recruiter

I receive job-offerings on a regular basis. That is really nice you’ve contacted me, but you need to stand out with your texts. And also: I’m not interested.

Most of the time it feels like spam receiving these template letters from people not knowing the industry or not knowing what a programming language is.

Even if the offer might be interesting in the end, I am not interested for some of the following reasons:

  • Wrong or lazy written templates
    • You’re using a template in which the salutation isn’t spelled out (German: Sg. instead of Sehr geehrter Herr …)
    • Any kind of typing errors
    • Leaving your placeholders in your template
    • MfG instead of “Mit freundlichem Gruss”
    • A really long text with no real value or information
  • Tell me more about your “intersting” projects, company culture, top equipment and so on
    • You want to convince me to switch companies with your interesting project might takes more information about the project. I might be heavily into CMS/PIM/DAM systems or backends and you are offering me a position in a company that only does e-commerce frontend work. I don’t want to invest time in such inapt jobs
    • What does the project might have that I’m interested in? Tell me about that in advance.
    • Anything related to company culture should be more than just mentioning it. Does the company have non-work related activities, regular feedbacks, code reviews and their like
    • Equipment is nice to have but I need to feel comfortable with it. You don’t know what type of equipment I like, but on the other hand you keep telling me it is top equipment…
  • Company pays for a moving costs
    • If I already told you that I’m not interested in moving it doesn’t make it more attractive in telling me the company will pay for a move
  • Offering me jobs with wrong programming languages
    • Tells me: you don’t understand your job and you don’t know what I am offering or your client is looking for and therefore wasting my and your clients time
  • Contacting me shortly after job change
    • I’ve changed my job, why should I be interested in joining your clients company? Ever thought about that the change might happened for a reason and I’ve already decided to work for a company

I think this is sort of annoying to get contacted with this kind of letters. I, as an employee trying to get to an interview, need to write a promotion letter, send a whole lot of information about my live, projects, reports and so on.

But you, as a recruiter contacting me, are allowed to just say “hi”? Sorry but I don’t like how this works. Either both of us are allowed to just say “hi” or we both stick to full reports, projects list etc.