EDIT: As an engineer / IC, even though its nice to talk to a competent recruiter, at the end of the day its all about learning what the role is, how much it pays, and if the company seems interesting or not.
also my post wasn't really "rate my thoughts" but "how would you fix tech recruiting?" i.e how would you build a better process than unqualified spam?
Also my theory on Linkedin, is that they have absolutely no incentive to make actually effective tools.
A recruiter have no other choices, Linkedin is basically a monopoly, if they build a tool that is actually effective at recruiting, you'd need less recruiters, so less linkedin memberships, and more engineering/processing power needed on Linkedin side, they have nothing to win by making good tools to find candidates, they just have to look good enough to purchase a membership since they have basically no competitors. It's kind of like Google Search, it's ineffective and infested by ads, by design, for money, they're just a monopoly and can get away with it.
You have people who are tasked with - finding someone to do a job they personally dont understand - given requirements often by someone who doesnt understand the requirements and often not the best interview set-up - dealing with candidates who have limited time or interest in interaction and more knowledge than the person tasked with finding them (information asymmetry)
who then are working on commission and sometimes against other recruiters.
Yes, I am similarly annoyed but I find this mindset ^^^ leads to better tools then "you ignorant person, I'm going to replace you with a robot"
But a lot of them are not even using the tools at their disposal correctly or are just being wildly dishonest and incompetent, a few examples:
-In the past 2 weeks I got contacted 3 times for expert JAVA/JEE jobs, java is NOT on my resume/linkedin/github, you don't have to know what it is to search for a keyword
-I got contacted for a Senior SRE role by a DECACORN, and actually invited to an interview, I'm neither a senior, nor doing SRE, none of these things are mentioned on my profile
-I get contacted for on-site jobs 1000miles away, when I'm basically mentioning everywhere that I only do full remote, even WORSE, sometimes they start by saying "open to remote/remote friendly" only to tell me after a few messages: "oh btw this requires moving to [FARAWAY_CITY], are you ok with that?"
-even worse than all that, yesterday I got contacted by a headhunter, after a terrible experience with him and a lot of time wasted, I guessed the name of the company and messaged the CEO, turns out they're not even one of their clients: they just message every dev possible then when someone say yes they message the CEO to TRY to sell them your profile for a public job posting
-they don't want to share information, we have to play a cat and mouse game to know basic stuff like what's the actual stuff I'm going to build, for what salary, using which technical stack, remotely or on the other side of the country, I feel like I'm playing a crappy game of "Guess Who?"
If this is not ignorance/incompetence or downright villainy, then what is it?
I think some industries are rotten to the core and this is one of them, there is nothing wrong with saying it. Do you have empathy for spammers?bankers?insurers?
To me "fixing" tech recruiting is trying to come up with new ways to advertise something, which I believe is an evolving process but not something that can ever truly be "fixed".
