[Remember one of the first castle scenes from Monty Python and The Holy Grail? It’s one of the inspirations for this post – watch it especially 1:57 in]
A recruiter who could care less what their quarry thinks about them? This brand of headhunter exists? You betcha!
Scott McKearney and Wojciech Zielinski, Moderators Manager for LinkedPHPers, the largest group of its kind on LinkedIn, are rip-roaring mad (as mad as a developer can get which when considering the Wikileaks supporters is pretty darn angry and vituperative): They’re deleting recruiters from the Group because these people simply won’t listen to their requests to post jobs in the Jobs section rather than directly in the Discussions.
Here’s the title of the Discussion thread that’s getting:
WARNING RECRUITERS-DELETE, AND BLOCK IN FORCE
IF I FIND THAT YOU HAVE POSTED A JOB IN THE DISCUSSION SECTION YOU WILL BE DELETED AND BLOCKED FROM REJOINING THE GROUP. ASK THE FIVE I JUST DID THIS TO THIS MORNING.
See how mad they are? All caps. Makes me shiver.
One member is referring to recruiters posting in the discussion as “the plague” – that’s both funny and telling.
These people are serious: “Just a short info for people that still does not believe that me or Scott are really removing people that does not follow the rules – on the Blocked list we already have 163 members and counting…” And correct in their actions – there’s a Job section, can Linkedin make posting jobs to group any easier?
One recruiter even posted back:
“Sorry people, I post my jobs via ShareThis. There is no option for the jobs section. Ban me you want. I’ll continue to post my jobs to my PHP group at [deleted] – Join there if you wish. Have a nice day.”
Pretty stubborn and arrogant.
This recruiter is pretty much saying, “Well, if I can’t play here, I’ll just take my ball elsewhere. Nanny, nanny, poo-poo.” I say find a different app or for a group such as this one with a significant user base, post by hand for which I have to say, “why bite the hand that feeds you?”
Recruiters need to learn to respect the wishes of the people who might end up being candidates; saying FU isn’t the best way to win friends and influence people.
And we wonder where the negative feelings towards recruiters come from?
The Recruiting Inferno 
It’s a fine line isn’t it? So if I posted a job in there that guaranteed a 25% increase in base salary and an angry birds tshirt to the winning candidate – you wouldn’t look at it geek moderator? Well, at least a filthy recruiter didn’t steal the open source php developers email list and send out a mass spamming jobs attack, could you imagine?!
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Andrew, herein lies a core issue that is emblematic of the relationship between recruiters and potential hires: Nothing matters except the hire. “If I would present to you an opportunity that was superior to your current job, would you agree to speak with me about it?”
No brainer.
But in this case, there’s a distinct place for jobs and many simply ignore it. LinkedIn is not – yet – a place that is solely for recruiting. The group in question values technical discussions and has requested that jobs be posted under the Jobs tab. But the same recruiters ignored the request if the Mods and were subsequently banned. I say “great” – nothing wrong with being respectful which is something even YOU do. ;)
As far as emailing an entire list, I’ll send you the email I sent out back then – it is very respectful and I heeded anyone’s request to never contact them again.
TTYS DK
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You forgot to note they are also semi-literate. There’s not a quote in your post that doesn’t contain at least one significant grammatical error.
Warning notices, even in all caps, won’t work if the target audience doesn’t make an effort to read them or cannot wrap their brains around a simple declarative sentence.
Sigh! Some of the group moderation on LinkedIn is feeble or non-existent. Then there are these moderation wars that break out and leave everyone looking rather stupid.
Just follow the rules, people, and if your mass-posting app won’t target your job notices where they’re supposed to go on a particular site, perhaps you need to re-think mass posting as a recruitment strategy.
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Too harsh Karen- many of those whose comments I used are not native English speakers.
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Interesting Steve, just after i read this i looked at the update email i get from the java group on Linkedin. Of the more than 50 “discussions” all but three were job postings. The vast majority posted in the discussion section reflected recruiters who are off shore, India and England for god’s sake. Perhaps it’s an extension of what recruiters have been fighting for years..those spam offers we get hundreds of from off shore firms when we post a job anywhere. When asked to stop or remove from email list they do not. I wonder, should Linkedin track the IP addresses and report them as spam to their provider, would that do any good? I hear the same thing from clients about these groups.
It’s one thing when it’s done and totally another when it continues to be done after notice is given. It makes me as mad as the group moderators you have quoted.
I am also seeing the marketing gurus telling recruiters to post information in the discussons to be part of the group. I find this offensive as most recruiters, unless they have come from a specific field don’t have much of anything to add to a discussion group that would be germane so my take is that it is creating “anti social media” reputations for a lot of recruiters.
Those of us who respect the expertise of the people in any group do not try and interject ourselves into discussions to promote a product, a firm or a job. So to you jerks who are doing it…Stop it ! Or maybe, ok fine, you want to be a jerk and get yourself banned , great, it will clear out the space for those of us who prefer to be regarded as professionals in our verticle instead of the cockroaches of the industry crawling all over anything and everything they can find.
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I moderate the “Entry-Level Jobs and Internships” group at LinkedIn and understand the frustration. I’ve also banned people from the group but only after (1) asking them privately to post jobs to the Jobs section and that I’ll ban them if they don’t post properly and then (2) posting a comment to their jobs saying I’ve moved them to the Jobs section and that I’ll ban them if they don’t post properly. I typically do that second step two or three times so they’ve been warned three or four times yet continue to ignore the warnings.
The people who ignore the procedures are probably the same who can’t understand why they aren’t getting great quality and quantity of responses to their vague, one sentence job postings on LinkedIn, Craigslist, and other free sites.
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It’s a continual battle with people. While I don’t really host any Linkedin groups, I am part of large email groups (i.e. google groups). We continually have issues with members sending junk out, and causing mass exodus from the older members (no offense). I try to get them to switch digest modes, but it doesn’t work. It’s a complete pain in the neck. At the same time, the junk is usually pretty funny and enjoyable articles, etc. It’s a similar situation. I see both sides, but it would be great if people used the correct groups for the correct correspondance. Anyway just wanted to say it’s just not recruiting related issues.
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@Sandra problem is that some recruiters like the one noted in the post don’t give a darn about being banned – arrogance is quite the buffer in the face of reality. I too wish they would go away but someone the sh*theads stay. :/
@Steven these recruiters justify their actions by claiming that if they can get someone $25K more per year then they’re performing a valuable service. Problem is that THERE’S A DANG TAB THAT SAY “JOBS” ON IT!!! Is that too hard to understand?
@Max good point – phishing takes place everywhere; doesn’t matter if it’s jobs or cures for erectile dysfunction. Uh, not that I’m reading emails about ED…
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If you’re gonna play in someone else’s backyard, you better play by their rules.
When I started in recruiting, I was an ignoramus. I posted in tech forums and every time I identified myself, I was burned at the stake. I quickly learned that forums are meant for idea sharing, not soliciting resumes.
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bahaha! Not sure how I landed here but as a developer I know firsthand how completely annoying it is to have kook recruiters (like that GTL clown who wrote the first post) constantly call you and yes show up in the middle of a dev forum on a thread where everyone is discussing something like the latest HTML5 hack and they intervene with some BS job post.
Honestly the best tech recruiters out there don’t even need to troll blogs or forums, they have a mad crazy rolodex of superstar talent on lock and if they don’t know someone directly then someone in their network will refer them to someone; and every developer I know (front end, database, etc.) usually has a handful of recruiters that act more like talent agents, than HR staff.
And to @D*ic*krecruit, the clown who referred to the moderators of the linked-in group “as geeks” and made some bogus comment about “angry birds” … you obviously have no game dude with that blog of yours that looks like Helen Keller designed it and ask our boy T.M. a tech recruiter out in the valley about his new s600 and how his bright his Panerai blings what he thinks of us “geeks” that bring down more in one month than you do in an entire year …
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Bogus – My whole post was completely mocking someone who actually did all that. It was completely facetious and actually almost as obnoxious as your reply to me (except for that Helen Keller reference – you stay classy Bogus!).
And for the record since you spent the better half of two paragraphs completely bashing my reputation even though you don’t know me from a hole in the wall. I’m sure I have a few engineers in my corner on this one. They’ll probably concur that my blog isn’t as cool as your awesome base salary – but I think I’ve helped enough guys with their careers to throw a Geek out there and not mean it in a derogatory way, but an endearing one.
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Often the issue is software on posting sites that allow posting to LinkedIn groups. It only posts to discussions and not to jobs , , , until you piss someone off, you don’t know. Sometimes, it is direct stupidity. Usually, though, it is the former.
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