Espoir Murhabazi

Posted on Apr 11, 2022 • Updated on Sep 13

A Letter to LinkedIn Recruiters

#recruiters #jokes #career #watercooler

Dear LinkedIn Hiring Managers and Aka Tech Recruiters,

I am writing to you people on behalf of my fellow developers.

Thank you for always trying to reach out to us, even if we mentioned that we are not looking for opportunities on our LinkedIn profiles. We appreciate the courage. We know what it takes for a man to try to date a woman who is in a relationship or married.

First, where were you when we were still based in the South? Africa, South America, or Asia? Why did you wait for us to be in Europe or America to start sending us your emails? Don't you know that the future of work is remote and that relocation exists? Brilliance is evenly distributed but opportunities are not. Please give opportunities to everyone.

Please, next time, if you are reaching out to us, please take some time to go over our profiles and read them carefully. Take some time to go over our Github pages as well. Most of the time, googling our name will take you to our portfolios. Don’t just copy-paste an email and send it to a list of people. This is how some of you requested a creator of a framework with four years of experience in the framework he created three years ago. Please do your research.

If we have agreed to discuss this with you, please, first of all, show up. We know the whole feeling of being ghosted and how it hurts. If we are talking on the phone, please make sure you read our CV/resume before; we don’t want to be asked questions about the technologies we are familiar with or proficient with. Learn our jargon. If we told you that we are proficient with the PyData Stack, why do you keep asking us if we know Pandas and Numpy? If we told you that we have worked with SpringBoot, why keep asking us if we know Java?

More importantly, never ask us for our salary expectations on the first call, tell us about the budget you have for the role, and that will be enough. Or even worse, asking us for our current salary. If we are currently underpaid, why try to continue with the same schema?

If you keep doing things like this and don’t change your practices, we will run away from your Linkedin and start posting our CV in JSON format to allow only people who can read them.

Regards.

Sincerely Busy Developers.

PS: I am not looking for work. I am happy with my current role, don’t try to reach out to me again after reading this message.

Top comments (26)

Makar • Apr 12 '22 • Edited

JSON CVs -- great idea!

fischgeek • Apr 12 '22

I couldn't stop thinking about this so I very quickly and crudely slapped this together. I hope this becomes a thing some day. Resumes can feel like a competition on who can point-and-click in Word fancier than the next person.

gist.github.com/fischgeek/c066fc29...

Espoir Murhabazi • Apr 12 '22

I like this..

fischgeek • Apr 12 '22

I agree! We need to get moving on this idea.

webbureaucrat • Apr 12 '22

I read this as "JSON CSVs" [comma-separated values] and my brain snapped in half.

Espoir Murhabazi • Apr 12 '22

to be honest, although I write this,, when I am going through it again , I am reading it that way...

Makar • Apr 12 '22

🤯

Espoir Murhabazi • Apr 12 '22

Loool...

Shrikant Dhayje • Apr 12 '22 • Edited

its funny that it is actually very relatable like few months ago i found an old advertisement for job opening on internet for web developers with 4 years of Experience in FastAPI Web Framework and that time the first FastAPI first version was released 3 years ago. 😂

Espoir Murhabazi • Apr 12 '22 • Edited

Yeah man.. it happened..

I remember the creator of fastapi tweeting about it.. I couldn't find the tweet.. I will post it if I find i t.

Alin Pisica • Apr 12 '22 • Edited

Here it is :)

Espoir Murhabazi • Apr 12 '22

Thanks you...

elrubens • Apr 13 '22 • Edited

JSON CV format: github.com/getmanfred/mac

Dave • Apr 13 '22

I wrote a similar letter and simply posted it on my LinkedIn profile.

Some recruiters are fantastic, some are just pushy sales folks.

Espoir Murhabazi • Apr 14 '22

I am curious to see yours..

Dave • Apr 14 '22

Since you asked, this is it, copy/pasted from LinkedIn:

Dear recruiters,

I'm a software developer, and I signed up to LinkedIn, probably like many others - I'm not actually actively looking for a new job. I like my current job. That said, my employer knows that I'm not silly enough to turn down a better opportunity, if one comes along.

I also signed up to LinkedIn, knowing that I'm essentially "The Product" - we all know recruiters get paid a finders fee by a new employer, and I'm aware that LinkedIn charges for some of their services.

In my job, I write systems that interface with other systems, and I take personal responsibility for not overloading 3rd party systems, and generally for writing clean, efficient, optimised code. I work in an Agile environment, and as part of my job, I'm involved in Discovery and post deployment Support phases of the Development Lifecycle. That is, I don't just "throw code over the wall." (We've all seen the "DevOps" meme's.)

I'm genuinely open to approaches by recruiters (and I'm writing this, expecting that I might alienate some of you, I apologise in advance).

I only ask one simple thing of you.

Don't spam me. Don't send me mail-shots from LinkedIn's InMail system (though, do use InMail for personalised messages, if you wish). Don't just call my number out of the blue.

If you genuinely care about your clients (the employers), view my profile (before sending me a connection request, ideally). Skim read by all means, and if you think my skill set matches what your client is looking for, get in touch. I'll be able to tell if you've taken the time to get the feel of my skills before contacting me (LinkedIn provide a number of notifications), and if you have, I promise I'll take the time to reply with my honest thoughts.

Sure, I'm asking you to do more work. I get that. But I also know that I'm The Product, and without The Product, you don't get paid by the client. By all means, find an automated way to list potential candidates, then filter through those manually (heck, talk to a Developer... maybe LinkedIn will have some sort of API exposed...)

If you insist on spamming me, then depending on my mood, I will either ignore your message, or I'll reply to tell you that I don't want to talk to you, purely because you just spammed me. If I do reply to any spam, feel free to continue the conversation with righteous indignation. At least you'll have made me laugh for a few seconds before I carry on my day.

(And for those that are curious, yes, this post is in response to the latest bit of righteous indignation - but no, I won't be naming the recruiter responsible. In future, I might just reply with a link to this post.)