So I worked in London for several years. Over 15 years I still get emails from these people. It was the most soul-destroying experience of my professional life and I could talk about this a lot eg fake interviews, not being put up for roles they said they would put you up for, modifying your resume, pricing you out of contention by adding a markup to your rate they never told you about, submitting you for positions you never authorized.

It's not as bad in the US now but I get a ton of cold emails (and even phone calls). I've seen similar advice here on HN about how you should respond to these and make a personal connection even if you aren't looking now. Do people really do this? I think this would take me hours each week. I'm not even a superstar. Far from it so please don't take it that way.

I'm an introvert. I'm far from alone in this as a software engineer. Now this, contrary to popular belief, doesn't mean you want to avoid social interactions. It simply means those social interactions have a cost. For some people (ie extroverts) the opposite is true. They feed on those interactions. I imagine you'd need to be that sort of person to be a recruiter.

The author here posits that independent recruiters are "valuable". Now this could be London colouring my view but I've found the complete opposite to be true. I've only looked for a job twice in the last 10 years and each time I quite deliberately only ever spoke to a company's recruiters. I've found independent recruiters and agencies to simply make a difficult process even more difficult.

My advice for any recruiter thinking of cold calling is:

1. I've long since stopped picking up unrecognized numbers. If you call me instead of emailing me, it's going to get ignored;

2. If your email doesn't look personalized it just gets immediately binned. I'm talking something like:

> Hi, I came across your profile and like the look of your skills and experience...

3. My experience has been that even sending a polite "I'm not currently looking" or even just a thank you is far too often taken as an invitation for follow up contact to "get to know you" or "discuss [whatever] further" so it's best for my personal sanity to simply ignore pretty much every email;

4. Just because I don't respond or respond immediately, it doesn't mean I haven't read it. The last time I looked for a job I ended up contacting a recruiter who'd sent me an email months earlier. This may not be how you as a likely extrovert deals with communication but you're not me and you inserted yourself into my inbox. It's not personal;

5. If you aren't able to cater the hiring pipeline to my experience then seriously don't even bother. What I mean by this is I've worked at Google and Facebook for >10 years. Do you or your client really think I can't code? If you are going to get someone a year out of college to give me a test on bisection search because "that's their process" then that tells me a lot about their culture and/or how they value your input. You want to talk systems design? Coding philosophy? Tech leadership? All of those are fair game. Bring it on. Happy to do it;

6. Realize that many of us engineers find phone calls to be disruptive and a profound waste of time, particularly when it usually entails a 30 minute "getting to know you" chat before you even start the process;

7. Do yourself a favour and if we must chat, send your calendar so I can pick a slot when you're available. I know my own schedule. I don't want scheduling to be a conversation;

8. If you reschedule or cancel once we've agreed to talk you'd better have a good reason or at least don't lie about it. Tech is a small world. If you tell me an emergency came up and you actually went skiing, don't think the candidate won't find that out from a friend or a friend of a friend who can check. Trust matters;

9. If you send the same email more than three times, it gets binned; and

10. There are certain areas I simply have no interest in (eg finance, Blookchain Andys). You're not to know that. It's not your fault. Everyone differs on this. Again, it's not personal.