About fake Linkedin recruiters?

Hey guys!

I’m not an expert of LinkedIn, so sometimes I see odd stuff and don’t understand what is going on.

For example, I have a lot of “recruiters” adding me and most of them they message me with the same template message. Something like “How are you finding the market” or “My client is looking for X”. And then when you reply, they just disappear (?). Basically, this kind of person looks nearly identical to the other ones (by the way they write).

Also, I found one case particulary weird. A man added me, we talked a little bit and then that conversation finished (he seemed a “real” person). A few months later, this person talks to me again (as we never talked before, using one of this templates I mention before), but under a name of a woman, with a photo of a woman that looks nothing like the man before. In my chat, obviously I can see that we talked before, but with them using a different name, surname, photo, profile data…

My question is, what do these people get out of this? Is there a scam scheme or something? I find it very strange because I don’t see them trying to scam me or anything, but I don’t know, they are like bots.

Not to mention that there is also those people who tell you details about the job, ask for you email to send you more details, and they never do. But suddenly you start receiving spam from jobs that have nothing to do with what are you looking for.

At this point, I cannot differenciate a genuine person/recruiter from a fake one.

What are your thoughts? I’m sure this has happened to you as well. How do you know when a person is real?

I started to reject invitations from people that I think they are not real but I don’t want to reject real recruiters.

Hello,

your experience is not out of the norm unfortunately. The “recruiter” with a different name and picture while having the same pitch? Scummy as hell, block them please!

Many recruiters on LI are either incompetent (offering Java jobs for JavaScript developers), just want seniors and don’t reply to anyone with less than 2 years experience, or scammers in the “forex trader” corner. You are lucky when you find a legit one. Sad fact.

LinkedIn can still be a great place to network, avoid recruiters. Link to other developers, tech firms of all sizes, developer groups and be active there, many jobs come through people you know that don’t want to scam you.

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I would recommend not wasting time with recruiters, especially if you’re in the early stage of your career.

Take the time you would have spent having go-nowhere conversations with recruiters and just apply/search for jobs directly.

Recruiters rarely have real relationships with the companies they tell you they represent. Their job involves scouring in the internet for job ads (which you could just do yourself), then spamming your cv to companies (which you could just do yourself). If it lands and you end up getting a job, it costs them nothing and they make a commission.

It’s a risk letting a stranger represent you to companies in your job search. Maybe the company doesn’t want to use a recruiter and ignores you for that reason.

Recruiters can’t do anything you can’t easily do yourself, 99% of the time they don’t have an established relationship with the employer, and they can’t provide any advice other than the most generic cv/interview advice that you’d find on a blog post through a google search. They also don’t tend to understand much about the jobs they’re putting you forward for either.

Also https://shopper-ecom.vercel.app/ this is a really nice start for a personal project, I like how personal it is. You should keep developing it. Test the functionality, look for bugs, refactor the code, build new features, integrate new tools or libraries, e.g. you could add TypeScript, unit tests, e2e tests. No software project is ever finished.

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