Recruiter here, though of the agency variety (even less popular than the internal recruiters). Google has no real excuse not to have a better candidate databas

Recruiter here, though of the agency variety (even less popular than the internal recruiters). Google has no real excuse not to have a better candidate database in place where this kind of thing doesn't happen. This person's information (email, GitHub account, LinkedIn, name, web pages, etc.) should all be entered into a system and marked as "DO NOT CALL" based on his previous interactions with Google. Google recruiters should be required to check the name and contact info of anyone before they send any correspondence - that only takes a minute. The Google recruiter might be required to do this already and just didn't do his/her job properly, but I can't imagine a company like Google doesn't have this system in place. The recruiter appears to have done some minimal level of research on the candidate, but it's hard to tell that the recruiter discovered anything other than the fact that this person had a GitHub account. Some recruiters looking for software engineers of any kind will contact anyone with a GitHub account, as most of those people will be developers. The recruiter could have done a bit more, and most recruiters could do a bit more research. All this said, if this candidate actually wanted to work for Google, this blog post never gets written. Candidates will accept a bit of laziness from the recruiter if it's from a desirable company. If this person was interested in Apple and this same email came from an Apple recruiter, the response is probably "Sure, let's talk!". Because it's Google, and because this person (unlike many in the world) doesn't want to work for Google and really wants us to know that he doesn't want to work for Google, this is supposed to be interesting. This kind of thing happens thousands of times a day. It's not unique or interesting.