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This. Look at the email and put it into one of 2 bins: 1) A recruiter that actually read your profile in several places (Linkedin, Github, Stackoverflow) and wh

This. Look at the email and put it into one of 2 bins: 1) A recruiter that actually read your profile in several places (Linkedin, Github, Stackoverflow) and who understood the combined picture of what they read. Send a polite canned response with an up to date "what I'm looknig for next time I switch" email. 2) Cold emails which obviously were sent to thousands with a canned message or a pitch completely foreign to your competence. Don't reply to those, you'll only get more of them and your connection to those recruiters won't have much future value either. I get probably a dozen emails in bin 2, for every email in bin 1. Most of the bin 2 emails right now are from a company called "Data Revolution" which seems based in the UK and that I can only assume is either completely automated recruiter spam (Their profile pictures seem oddly stock-photoish), or some sort of dystopian gig-economy recruitment firm for people who rather send emails than drive Ubers. The bin 1 contacts have actually returned on several occasions with those really rare job profiles I describe in my response, so this does work very well. I basically have a dozen people looking at job ads for me so I don't miss those one-in-a-thousand jobs I'm looking for.

flixic 5y ago
Do you mark Bin 2 as spam? I tend to, but not sure if it’s a good idea.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  I never even considered that there is a “mark as spam” feature in Gmail tbh.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
This appears to be the best approach. I find it counter-productive to foster bad relationships with recruiters, although many of them have treated me most barbarously (I'm over 40, which means that I'm "radioactive"). LinkedIn sells a fairly pernicious type of spam, which allows recruiters to craft messages that seem to be quite personal. I have made the mistake of responding to these, in the past, as if they were personal. No harm in that, but I really waste my time, and the recruiters'.
laurent123456 5y ago
This makes sense if they are proper recruiters. I usually just ignore those unless I'm looking for work. But the worst kind are the recruiters based in India - they keep sending irrelevant emails for jobs in the US where I don't even live, and no matter how many times I flag them as spam in Gmail they keep going through. I think they found a loophole to go around Gmail spam filter, so the only way is to manually add them to a filter.
windexh8er 5y ago
I actually have a random string of characters at the end of my LinkedIn profile to find those good recruiters. It states very clearly that I will not respond to any recruiter unless that string is in either their LinkedIn or email outreach. I get about 6 recruiters a year that actually read my profile to the end and follow the instruction. For those recruiters I always engage with a thankful response of their due diligence regardless of whether or not I'm interested. I've made a few great acquaintances over the years of great recruiters this way.
alexis2b 5y ago
Data Revolution is one of the brands used by a UK based recruitment agency named VMR Consultants. As a hiring manager they are the worst I ever encountered - sending template emails every day where only the candidate name would change. Looking at their Glassdoor profile they look like an abusive employer as well. I am usually nice to people but in their case I would straightforwardly answer “sorry, I blacklisted your firm” and hang up to any poor soul cold calling on behalf of one of their brands… Stay away!
jnxx 5y ago
> 2) Cold emails which obviously were sent to thousands with a canned message or a pitch completely foreign to your competence. Just out of curiosity, especially in UK there seem to be companies that scrape CVs from job web sites, feed all the addresses into databases, and send these indiscriminate emails if a few keywords match. And if one responds, they ask for a telephone call and might call dozens of times. At some point, I was actually wondering whether it would be possible to automatically get phone numbers of that kind of people into said CV data bases (with an obviously useless auto-generated CV that however has matching keywords).

flixic 5y ago

Do you mark Bin 2 as spam? I tend to, but not sure if it’s a good idea.

alkonaut 5y ago
I never even considered that there is a “mark as spam” feature in Gmail tbh.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

This appears to be the best approach. I find it counter-productive to foster bad relationships with recruiters, although many of them have treated me most barbarously (I'm over 40, which means that I'm "radioactive"). LinkedIn sells a fairly pernicious type of spam, which allows recruiters to craft messages that seem to be quite personal. I have made the mistake of responding to these, in the past, as if they were personal. No harm in that, but I really waste my time, and the recruiters'.

laurent123456 5y ago

This makes sense if they are proper recruiters. I usually just ignore those unless I'm looking for work. But the worst kind are the recruiters based in India - they keep sending irrelevant emails for jobs in the US where I don't even live, and no matter how many times I flag them as spam in Gmail they keep going through. I think they found a loophole to go around Gmail spam filter, so the only way is to manually add them to a filter.

windexh8er 5y ago

I actually have a random string of characters at the end of my LinkedIn profile to find those good recruiters. It states very clearly that I will not respond to any recruiter unless that string is in either their LinkedIn or email outreach. I get about 6 recruiters a year that actually read my profile to the end and follow the instruction. For those recruiters I always engage with a thankful response of their due diligence regardless of whether or not I'm interested. I've made a few great acquaintances over the years of great recruiters this way.

alexis2b 5y ago

Data Revolution is one of the brands used by a UK based recruitment agency named VMR Consultants. As a hiring manager they are the worst I ever encountered - sending template emails every day where only the candidate name would change. Looking at their Glassdoor profile they look like an abusive employer as well. I am usually nice to people but in their case I would straightforwardly answer “sorry, I blacklisted your firm” and hang up to any poor soul cold calling on behalf of one of their brands… Stay away!

jnxx 5y ago

> 2) Cold emails which obviously were sent to thousands with a canned message or a pitch completely foreign to your competence. Just out of curiosity, especially in UK there seem to be companies that scrape CVs from job web sites, feed all the addresses into databases, and send these indiscriminate emails if a few keywords match. And if one responds, they ask for a telephone call and might call dozens of times. At some point, I was actually wondering whether it would be possible to automatically get phone numbers of that kind of people into said CV data bases (with an obviously useless auto-generated CV that however has matching keywords).