Walter Watts
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In Hunt for Programmers, Desperation Sets In
« on: 2007-08-03 18:19:35 » |
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August 3, 2007, 7:07 am
In Hunt for Programmers, Desperation Sets In
By David F. Gallagher
How eager are Web companies to hire hard-to-find software developers? So eager that they are apparently willing to bombard their own users with recruiting spam.
DeWitt Clinton, a programmer at Google, said on his blog yesterday that he received a recruiting pitch from LinkedIn, the popular networking site for professional types: “From your LinkedIn Profile, we thought you may be a good fit for the LinkedIn Engineering team.” Mr. Clinton is a LinkedIn member, but not because he is looking for a job. In fact his profile on the site, which is visible to other members, specifically states, “Sorry, no recruiters, please,” and he has turned off the flags that would indicate to searchers that he is on the market.
Jason Shellen, who recently left Google, and another current employee chimed in on Mr. Clinton’s blog to say they had received similar notes, and Mr. Clinton later added that it looked as if LinkedIn had “spammed everyone at Google.”
Mr. Shellen, who is not a programmer, said in an e-mail that the message from LinkedIn annoyed him because he expected the company to be better at targeting potential hires, “not to mention that I don’t remember opting in to receive direct offers like this from LinkedIn.”
An e-mail and phone call to LinkedIn were not returned last night.
LinkedIn, like most social networking sites, tries to put users in control by allowing them to specify whether and how they want to be contacted by people they don’t know. Such sites depend on the trust and good will of users to keep growing, so for the site’s own employees to ignore a user’s explicit requests is a little wacky. And annoying the programmers at Google, which sometimes seems to have hired the nation’s entire supply, doesn’t seem like a wise strategy. Perhaps when you’re sitting on a database of 12 million résumés, the urge to exploit it to the max eventually becomes too hard to ignore.
Update: A LinkedIn representative says she is looking into what happened here.
Update: Kay Luo of LinkedIn writes to say the company made a mistake when sending the message:
We blew it. What happened was a recruiting email accidentally went out as a marketing email. Therefore the “open to opportunities” filter wasn’t applied and instead it was sent to anyone who fit the target demographic and was open to marketing emails. This was an egregious mistake on our part. To our knowledge, it hasn’t happened before and we plan to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The people responsible for the mistake feel especially bad since we take such a strong position against spam and untargeted email blasts. Hopefully you, your readers, and the recipients of the email can understand that this was an unintentional human error. We are indeed in a rush to hire good programmers and in our frenzy we made a mistake.
Also, a Google employee in New York says he heard of a lot of people at the company getting LinkedIn spam, including non-programmers — but nobody that he knew of in the New York office. Are Google employees only hot properties if they’re in the Valley?
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