"Impersonal lack of human touch for we, but not for thee."
It used to be easy to spot effort: a cool logo on a business card, an interesting website design, a recruiter email that speaks to a specific experience I have on my LinkedIn profile. This used to indicate that someone was willing to do a bit more than the bare minimum and gave them some legitimacy.
Now I see any of these things and I have to do the extra work to try to figure out if it was AI generated.
But low-effort spam will always dominate, that's just the nature of it. You will always receive 10 times more messages that were only 1/10th of the work on the other side. How could it ever be otherwise?
Whenever a message starts with “Hi (emoji) (first name)” it’s 100% spam.
So far they are not training to fix this (all they have to do is drop the prefix), which is somewhat surprising. Zero messages that address me correctly seem automated. Maybe because in today’s day people can legitimately have emoji in their names?
Never mind that I've never sent them my resume, and my LinkedIn is bare bones with only a job history and no description or skills. I investigate further and the Chief Engineer of this program is in his mid-20s and has only ever worked at said DefenseTech startup.
I once was talking to a headhunter about a position he had (IIRC). I wasn't interested, but mentioned someone else he should look at. When he found out where my contact was currently working, he said, "Oh, they're a client. I can't recruit from there."
He went on my list. A headhunter with ethics about not stealing employees from his own customers? That's good enough to make him someone I want to talk to when I'm in the market.
Keep adding to the list on the (rare) occasion that a headhunter does something that catches your notice. Takes five minutes a year, if you're lucky. When you're next looking for a job, it can save you days.
> they probably haven't spent more than 10 seconds looking at my profile to see if it’s a fit.
I doubt they even glance at your profile, probably scraped and stored somewhere that's sold to these AI recruiting / sourcing companies the recruiters use.
If I get email or a message that includes that character, it proves software sent the message and it wasn’t typed by a human.
It only gets worse from there when I'm trying to contact Krzysztof Wiśniewski.
I look at them with a mixture of pity and contempt. They are examples of "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King" work: i conjecture that this type of "shallow customization" is going to be most persuasive with recipients who have very little exposure to slop and/or the kinds of things human recruiters used to say when visually scanning some stale copy of a résumé while on the phone with the prospect.
I mean, before it was humans using template text with dynamic fields; in some cases the first time the sending human would actually see the message would be if you responded.
But now you can get all the way to the first call booking without a human ever being troubled to participate in the interaction.
In my experience, LLMs have not improved the quality of targeting (let's assume for each person doing outreach there are at least a few people who actually want the messages being sent), and my inbox is absolutely flooded with AI generated campaigns. I have stopped unsubscribing and I just mash the spam flag.