DeWitt Clinton

I’m not sure why this irks me so much, but it does. I received this email from a recruiter who works for LinkedIn:

Dear DeWitt,

From your LinkedIn Profile, we thought you may be a good fit for the LinkedIn Engineering team.

With 12 million members and 180k new members per week, LinkedIn is the largest and fastest growing professional network in the world. We’re changing the way that business gets done-especially for professions where relationships and finding the right person really matter. We’re still small (130 employees), but have a huge upside–we’ve been profitable for more than a year, despite having only scratched the surface of a huge market.

We’re looking for the best engineers at all levels: Software Engineers, Sr. Software Engineers, Principle Engineers, Web Developers and Architects with various experiences in the following:

Java/J2EE
Ruby on Rails
API Builds & Toolbar
Ajax/JSP
Dom Scripting/CSS
We’ll provide aggressive compensation packages (including pre-IPO stock options), catered food and lively games of guitar hero.

If this sounds interesting, please respond to this email with a resume or LinkedIn profile.

Also, feel free to forward this on to anyone you know who might be a good fit.

Thanks,

[redacted]
LinkedIn Recruiting Team

I’m not connected directly to this individual, but I am apparently connected to her network. By policy I don’t have recruiters on my own contacts list, even those I happen to work with.

The problem is that I set my LinkedIn account settings specifically to turn away recruiting requests like this, as I’m not even remotely looking, so there is no reason to waste anyone’s time.

Here’s what my communication settings look like:

In other words, I explicitly un-checked the boxes for “Career opportunities”, “Consulting offers”, “New ventures”, and the like. And if that wasn’t enough, I added the personal note: “Sorry, no recruiters, please.”

Even in spite of that, I still get my share of recruiting spam via LinkedIn. But I wouldn’t have expected it from someone who works there and is ostensibly trying to protect the integrity their company and the preferences of their users.

My settings allow for “Introductions” and “InMail”, whatever those are, but this apparently didn’t go through those channels. It was a regular old email, and the footer at the bottom of her the read:

This message is part of an occasional mailing to help you get the most out of LinkedIn. If you prefer not to receive these messages, click here.

Following the link, I read that my communication preferences were to allow LinkedIn to contact me with email updates under the following circumstances:

LinkedIn’s email updates currently notify you of new features that you might want to try. In the future, they will also include tips for getting the most out of LinkedIn and useful information about your network that you can’t get from the web site.

Being generous, I could interpret this as a “tip for getting the most out of LinkedIn,” but really, I’d just like it to stop. I realize that LinkedIn is providing a service and that many people who use it will happily opt in to recruiting pitches. However, even LinkedIn employees should respect their user’s preferences when those users have asked to opt out of these things.

That only seems fair, right?

Update: Apparently they sent this note out to many, many people at Google. Not a good way to make friends and influence people…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 by DeWitt Clinton and is filed under linkedin, recruiting. You can bookmark this post at del.icio.us. You can digg this post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.