Accurate descriptions in my experience. Luckily in my very first role ever(a long time ago now) I worked with the second type. Unfortunately he's retired now, b

Accurate descriptions in my experience. Luckily in my very first role ever(a long time ago now) I worked with the second type. Unfortunately he's retired now, but he matched me with a lot of very good jobs. But also he matched those companies with me. It was exactly the process of cultivating relationships (let's go get dinner/lunch, let's just shoot the shit, etc.) And he didn't waste anyone's time. That made people take him seriously and either reach out to him from the hiring side or instantly take his calls on the "searching side." I think what's worrisome to me is that the first type you described. I fully expect it from job board scouring 3rd party "recruiting" agencies and my spam box does too. What I don't expect is for the first type to increasingly be representatives directly from the company themselves. And this isn't exactly some no-name company looking to add you to their cubicle farm. (Or maybe they have a name and ALSO a cubicle farm). My personal feelings aside, I get that they need "volume" but I don't think these types of tactics are the way to go about it. And no I don't have a solution for it, it is indeed a hard problem :) Interestingly from some of my academic days there might be something to draw some inspiration from for a solution. Social scientists trying to sample either hard to reach populations (due to social stigma) or hard to find populations (small overall number of members) use Chain Referral sampling. It's an interesting topic. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/004912418101000205 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/004912418101000205 For hard to reach research papers.. there's at least a solid solution for that!