Originally Posted by
Adam Smith
What is it with headhunters and LinkedIn? I've been corresponding with one over the last few weeks about an opportunity, and I told him at the outset (same as I told him a couple of years ago when we first met) that I rarely check LinkedIn and he should contact me via e-mail or messaging app (and so we've been e-mailing), and tonight I see that a few days ago he invited me to an event... via LinkedIn message.
I've found this same annoying habit with a number of others over the last few years. Anyone have any insight on this? I get it when they're first blasting out an opportunity or whatever, but outside of that, do they really expect everyone to just constantly be on LinkedIn? I decided years ago that it had gone downhill and wasn't worth monitoring actively or checking very frequently, and a lot of people I know feel the same. Am I off-market?
What's the problem, that you've looked in to it but haven't ever booked them?
To put it simply - it's because sliding into your e-mail makes their work a lot harder, so they tend not to do it.
It's because headhunters/recruiters on LinkedIn use a slightly beefed up version of LinkedIn (look up LinkedIn Business's Talent Solutions), similar to the kind that dedicated Salespeople use (LinkedIn Sales Navigator). As a result, when recruiters/headhunters engage now, it's not just you; they're spamming a metric ton of other people with the same poorly personalized stuff and managing it all through LinkedIn's inbox (because this information also feeds back to
their boss about how they're doing on engagement). Taking those conversations 'private' and off LinkedIn, engaging you directly via e-mail (while convenient for you and for good reason) makes it harder for them to track those conversation threads and lose visibility post the initial 'opportunity blast'.
I remember a time about 10 - 15 years ago when being an executive recruiter was an extremely high bar; you were tapped to find C-suite positions, there were a lot of wining and dining involved and even for senior positions in tech, coming in from a recruiter meant you had a good chance of actually landing the job and were seriously vetted before entering the hiring process. Those standards have dropped dramatically since then in the glut of all the bigger tech mass-hiring/mass-firing - now anyone with a laptop and some AI-generated copy can shotgun spam the same JD to eleventy billion people and hope for the best.