On Persistent Recruiters

tl;dr If I sent this to you I've identified you as a persistent recruiter and probably also blocked you.?

I like working with recruiters. I've gotten a bunch of jobs through recruiter refferals. Internal ones and external ones. I appreciate being informed about interesting roles I might be interested in pursuing. But I'm also really busy, have a constant flood of communication going in and out, and a pretty high bar for what's required in a new role (see Ted Dziuba's Why Engineers Hop Jobs).?

Recently this particular thing has been bugging me. I've seen essentially this same job listing in my messages (sometimes this is via e-mail instead) a pile of times from different people. At the time of this writing I think were at 8 times, though when I look them over more carefully maybe the men aren't all exactly the same job, but similar jobs with similar base pay.?

Anyway if you send me a message about a job l usually look at the thing but the stars have to align if I'm going to respond and there are some minimum requirements for that.?

1. salary has to be specified - I'm pretty senior and have certain salary expectations. I don't want to waste either of our time because the listed base salary is significantly less than the minimum I'd consider. CA and NY your new laws about this have helped a little it seems. (Though a range of 108K-254K isn't really helpful employer type folks... [1])
2. I have to be at a place in my role where I might be willing to consider a change and I make this difficult to determine via my LinkedIn profile for "reasons" but generally I'm not on the market. I've only been off work twice since graduating from high school, once for a medical thing and now because I'm taking a sabbatical. I usually only look for new roles after several years with an employer (though from time to time sooner for some problematic roles I've found myself in). So the chances of finding me looking for a role start out slim.

Generally speaking if the above conditions are true I'll write back. Sometimes if a role looks particularly interesting I might even write back if the salary isn't specified (but that'll usually get you my "I'm not looking right now but here are my requirements" form letter). If I don't respond something in your job post didn't match what I'm looking for or I'm not looking. It seems like most recruiters seem to magically know this, but others do not. Messaging me over and over with the same or similar roles that I haven't responded to before isn't going to suddenly get me to respond. Once a quarter or maybe even half a year seems more appropriate but eight times in two months is excessive. There are all sorts of exceptions, but if you've made me think that your messages are spam... I treat them like spam.

Also I discovered that these might be generated by some bulk mailer software because after I'd blocked one of the senders I got a message which had the template exposed. So that's something else to think about it. I don't really want to respond to bulk mail either. :-)

Also, Also this was not the next thing I planned to post, but was so annoyed about getting yet another message about the same damn job that I felt I didn't have any choice but to write this on my SATURDAY morning.

[1] I realize they might be hiring for a range of skill levels but that's now how I'd organize things it makes things unclear