
Ask HN: Should I be bothered by this recruiter's tactics? - nsxwolf
I just received this email from a recruiter and found it unsettling:<p><i>Hi &lt;nsxwolf&gt;,<p>I was just cruising around GitHub and took a look at some of the repositories you&#x27;re interested in. I also checked out the Meetups you&#x27;ve been going to as well, and based on your interests, I wanted to reach out to you and see if you&#x27;d like to hear more about a job I&#x27;m looking to fill.</i><p>I expect to get messages from recruiters on LinkedIn, but this seems very intrusive and unwelcome.<p>I didn&#x27;t know I was sharing any information on GitHub. I just looked at the &quot;public activity&quot; tab on my GitHub profile and it says I have no public events to show.<p>I also didn&#x27;t know how public my Meetup info was, but I don&#x27;t manage to attend anything anyway, so I guess I&#x27;ll just take those down.<p>Should I reply and complain to this person? Or am I overreacting? There&#x27;s no secret blacklist amongst tech recruiters, is there?
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le_douard
Personally I would love to receive something like that message.

I consider (And share in my CV) my stackoverflow, github, and linkedin are
good representation of what I can do as a professional and thus I am careful
with what I share on those. Meetup might be a stretching it a bit if you also
use it for hobbies and you don't like sharing those on your CV.

This guy has done his homework, and has checked a lot of sources to make sure
YOU fit the position before contacting you, that takes time and that time is
his company's money. So frankly I would take it as a sign of a company that
really gives a lot of F*cks about who works for them.

Again depending on how you use Meetup he might have overstepped a bit. For
example mentioning your facebook, google+ or others might have been too much
for me too.

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JSeymourATL
> Should I reply and complain to this person? Or am I overreacting?

Yes, you're overreacting, it goes with the territory for talent in a hot
space. Linkedin response rates are down due to user fatigue. But I'm also wary
of messages that come across as recruiter cat-phishing.

Assuming his firm looks legit. Ask him to first forward a detailed position
summary for review. You can then make an informed decision whether to dialog
any further. Make him earn the conversation.

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pjungwir
This may have come from a site like talentbin.com, which gives recruiters a
keyword search based on profiles from Github, StackOverflow, etc. I worked on
a competing site for a bit until I decided it was a force for evil not good
and shut it down. My site was pulling data from about 20 online communities,
among them Github and Meetup.

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gregcohn
Consider the alternative: "Hi, I think you might be a developer, but I haven't
looked at any of your public stuff, and yet in a thinly veiled attempt to make
it seem like this email is personalized, I'm going to tell you I think you're
a particularly good fit for this role, which involved [buzzword], [buzzword],
and [buzzword]!"

Would that be more to your liking?

Github and Meetup are inherently social, default-public communities. You
should consider it a sign of respect -- or at least a signal of intent -- that
someone's taken the trouble to actually review your stuff.

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benologist
You should make your stuff private if you are uncomfortable with the entire
internet having easy, open access to it. If the sites/services you use don't
have appropriate measures complain to them or use something else.

There's really not much point complaining, you might stop _that_ person but
not the actual process he's using.

[http://bitbucket.org/](http://bitbucket.org/) has unlimited private
repositories for teams under 5 which is a great way to sandbox non-public
projects.

~~~
nsxwolf
In the GitHub case, I have no repositories. I only view other projects and
sometimes download them. Is that information public? I don't see where.

~~~
benologist
View your profile in incognito mode and you'll see what's public or not.

If you are 'leaking' information this way you can avoid it by anonymously
cloning projects to elsewhere, and not commenting or w/e interactions are
broadcasted. Github has really shitty privacy controls so I don't think you
can conceal yourself very much while using their service.

~~~
pjungwir
I believe even if you don't share your email address on Github, someone can
still pull it out of your commmits. At least that used to be possible.

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junto
Better than the usual...

    
    
       "I see you are a .NET Developer. I have a excellent 
       Java role that I think you will be interested it."

