Show HN: A simple tool to help filter recruiter spam

Show HN: A simple tool to help filter recruiter spam(filteredreduced.dev)

30 points by darraghor 4 years ago | 40 comments

I made a tool for myself to act as a filter for recruiter messages.

I was tired of getting vague messages and doing the typical messaging back and forth only to hear the salary was too low or the job didn't have remote.

The tool lets you create a form with a selection of only the filters you want on there. You give a unique link to recruiters that will take them to the your form They can fill in your form (or not) If their responses pass your filters you'll get an email. If their responses fail your filters, the recruiter gets an email saying so, so they know not to bother you again.

The idea is that recruiters can never see your filter values

You can rate limit individual recruiter submissions per day (they have to log in to submit)

Keen for any feedback thanks!

I'm especially keen for any feedback from recruiters if you do decide to use it :)

cheers, dar

eloisius 4 years ago |

My solution is a little heavy handed, but if a recruiter email doesn't include the company, position, and a salary range, it's spam and I mark it as such. If they send me a "just checking in after my last email," I add their domain to a rule in Fastmail. The rule sorts them into a folder and classifies them as spam. I'm not sure if Fastmail sends a spam complaint, but I hope so. Email-sending services tend to take those complaints somewhat seriously because it can torch the reputation of their IP addresses.

88913527 4 years ago |

The simplest way to detect recruiters reaching out to you without much thought is to use weird UTF8 characters in your LinkedIn name. The recruiter's message will be canned, but parameterized with your name. The parameterization gives you a means for communicating with yourself.

This fixes the problem for cold recruiter e-mails I get too, since they seem to scraping LinkedIn for contacts. You can change the character over time to have a sense of when they scraped the data, too.

justusthane 4 years ago | |

Seems like this has the potential for a high rate of false positives. If I were a recruiter typing out personal messages, I'd still likely copy and paste the name just to be sure I got it right.

88913527 4 years ago | | |

Fortunately, you do have options for what will and won't get around the human filter, when it comes to choosing your weird character.

For example, a human knows that in name "John[Emoji] Doe", the [emoji] isn't likely a legitimate part of John's first name (imagine, if HN permitted, the emoji was a dolphin), whereas, "Renée Doe" a recruiter might copy-and-paste for accuracy.

addandsubtract 4 years ago | | |

My personal filter is messages that read, "Hi [name], I love what you have done for [current company]..."

I develop B2B software in a niche market. How could you have possibly seen any of my work?

darraghor 4 years ago | |

yea nice! I do this too with an emoji in my linked name.

rosgoo 4 years ago |

I'm trying to solve the same problem with https://leapful.dev/ that I'm currently working on! It's like a minimal LinkedIn alternative + "reverse job search" where you input job criteria and only get jobs that match those. Let me know your thoughts!

darraghor 4 years ago | |

hey! That's an awesome app! It definitely feels like theres a real problem in this dev-sourcing space alright. The current recruiter model is so spammy and linked in doesn't respect my "I'm NOT looking" setting. It's hard to beat linkedin's network effects though. Best of luck with this!

Wronnay 4 years ago |

Can't imagine that Recruiters will fill out that form.

darraghor 4 years ago | |

Yea so originally that was my plan to be honest. I just wanted to give them something so onerous they would go away.

Then I thought it would actually be useful to me if i could hear about interesting roles so i made the questions semi-configurable to shorten the form.

It could be useful for them if they could get an indication why their role sucks (they can see which category failed in filtering).

But you're right though. So far, in general, recruiters hate it.

tata71 4 years ago | |

Working already.

mtlynch 4 years ago |

Cool idea!

I'd suggest offering a demo mode that users can play with before they sign up. Requiring an email address before users can see anything is going to dissuade a lot of people.

I think the UX could be improved by guiding the user a little bit through the process. When I first signed in, the first thing it showed me was an email template I'm supposed to send to recruiters, but I'd expect the first step to be showing me how to create my custom questionnaire.

The questionnaire setup is kind of intimidating. There are I think 40+ different toggles and questions on a single page. It seems like some UI controls are irrelevant when other controls are disabled (e.g., I think "Reject if no family friendly policies" has no effect unless the corresponding "Include this question" toggle is disabled, but the UI doesn't make that clear. It might be easier to work with if it was more like a UI wizard where the user is only seeing a few options at a time and they can easily skip categories they don't care about.

The perspective also shifts confusingly in the questionnaire. The first question has options "I'm a recruiter," "I'm the hiring manager," and "I don't care about this." These aren't the same "I" right? Like the recruiter can't answer that they don't care about this question, right?

darraghor 4 years ago | |

Hey,

Thanks so much for the constructive feedback. I'll see if i can make all of this better!

dar

thrownaway561 4 years ago |

there is no recruiter who is going to waste their time filling in a form to contact you. recruiters nowadays use linkedin for all of their correspondence with candidates, only the schumbags use email or text. any email i get from a recruiter, i just mark as spam, any text or phones calls, i just block. just open a linkedin account, update your profile to match your resume and start connecting with the recruiters you want in your area or industry. it's that simple.

darraghor 4 years ago | |

Hey,

Thanks for the comment.

Recruiters on linkedin ignore the "I'm not looking" setting and spam candidates anyway. Linked even gives them tools to do this! So linkedin doesn't fix this issue unfortunately.

You can reply to linkedin spam messages with the filteredreduced link. It's just text. Thats what i do.

Unfortunately linkedin don't offer an api to let me automatically respond to messages on their system. Now that would be awesome if they did!

thrownaway561 4 years ago | | |

that maybe so, but again, no recruiter is going to fill out a form to contact you, which is the primary selling point of your site.

cmckn 4 years ago |

I only get a trickle of this type of spam, but I think that makes it more annoying? In the last six months it seems worse, multiple “just checking one more time” messages for positions that have literally zero overlap with my experience or interests. Often asked to “forward to my network,” as if I’d do the spammer’s job for them. Being reached out to can be great, it’s how I got my current job, but so many firms seem to use this approach carelessly.

ichinco 4 years ago |

I really like this, but I wish I could write my own questions. For example -

1. Do you offer a 4d work week? 2. Do you offer parental leave? How much? How long after starting do you become eligible for it? 3. How many days of PTO do you get per year?

I imagine that some of these questions are pretty specific to me, hence my hope that you could add custom questions.

darraghor 4 years ago | |

Hey! Yea it's just too much work for a free thing to write a completely custom question/filter generator thingy :) The backend is all hardcoded and nasty for MVPing. I might revisit that at some stage but it's not possible right now.

I'll see about adding those questions you mentioned though!

0xbadcafebee 4 years ago |

I want OkCupid for recruiting. Recruiter puts what they're looking for, I put what I'm looking for and what my actual skills/experience are. Additional questions ("Family friendly policies?", "Active diversity program?") get answered with a rating (not important/kinda important/very important) and whether an answer is mandatory. Algorithm generates closest matches, you get matches in e-mail. Assuming the candidate is interested, the job listing can require questions of the candidate, so the employer can filter who is applying and avoid manually going through 1000's of resumes (huge problem in hiring)

eloisius 4 years ago | |

Recruiters will just dishonestly check all the boxes that you're looking for. They don't care if they waste your time with a bad match. They carpet bomb everyone with their 'opportunity' because it's no cost to them.

0xbadcafebee 4 years ago | | |

I'm not so sure. Think of the way OkCupid works: you fill out a bunch of questions and what you're looking for, and an algorithm creates matches. You can of course unilaterally send messages to whomever, but those people don't have to read the messages, they can just look at their algorithmic matches.

If the recruiter puts inaccurate information in the job listing to try to skew the algorithmic match, it actually wouldn't work; their overly-broad job requirements wouldn't be a fit for your more specific list of tech, so it would show up as a poor match. Only candidates and job listings that have very close requirements/provides would show strong matches. In other words, recruiters are not sending you some tailored thing; they can only create job listings, and the matches only show up to you if they happen to match what you list.

You could also add privacy protections so that recruiters actually can't see your profile at all until you click on a job that you like. You still see the matches and recommendations in your e-mail, so they don't even have to reach out to you. A lot of job sites already do this (automatically recommending you to one or more jobs via e-mail) but they don't have the deep profile data we could compose with questions about more than just tech.

schleck8 4 years ago |

This right here just hit the frontpage, might be a fun idea to shield your contact info

https://codecaptcha.io/

bodge5000 4 years ago |

My solution to it is a lot more heavy handed. I just setup a filter for any messages containing words like "developer", "python", "career", ect... and have the message archived and put into its own folder

False positives happen, and would probably happen more frequently if I were involved in other circles over email, but I do try to check the folder every now and again to make sure Im not missing anything important, or something that might be interesting

gwbas1c 4 years ago |

I'd really like to see a demo (or good screenshots) before signing up.

1: Screenshot of the options that I can set 2: Screenshot of the link in a recruiter chat 3: Screenshot of everything the recruiter sees

I should be able to skim the above in 15 seconds. Animated screenshots are best. Don't go embedding a Youtube video unless it shows the entire thing in the first 20 seconds.

FYI, as some people have mentioned: Forcing the recruiter to create an account is a major no-no.

darraghor 4 years ago | |

Hey thanks so much for the suggestions!

I've added all this to my list!

dar

londons_explore 4 years ago |

> recruiters can never see your filter values

I'd like to allow recruiters to see some or all of my filter values. For example, my requirement for remote work isn't a secret. I am quite happy for a recruiter to know that rather than having to guess, especially if they have a list of roles to fill, some of which might meet my criteria.

tjpnz 4 years ago |

Nice to see Kiwisaver getting a mention!

Can you give some options for other currencies? I'm after Japanese Yen.

darraghor 4 years ago | |

ohh nice suggestion. i'll see if i can add a currency selector or maybe make it more generic.

it's difficult to fully internationalise it with so little time to spend on it tbh

kwerk 4 years ago |

What is the response you’re seeing from recruiters?

darraghor 4 years ago | |

I've had the full range of emotions from filling it in and messaging "cool idea" to anger.

The comments from recruiters in post about a similar form (this is not referring to my tool) sums it up! - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-rolls-6aa95bba_has-anyo...

gurgus 4 years ago |

This looks like a really neat tool but I wish that people didn't have to sign up in order to submit a response to the survey.

darraghor 4 years ago | |

yea fair call! i just wanted to be able to stop recruiters spamming a candidate to find their filters so i limit the number of submissions they can make to a single candidate in a day.

onion2k 4 years ago |

Just stop accepting recruiters are a necessary part of the process. They aren't. Especially the spammy ones.

Recruiters typically charge 20% of your salary to a company that recruits you. If you apply directly to the company and they hire you, they save a lot of money. That gives you a significant advantage over people who rely on recruiters to find them roles. If you're looking for a new job, make a short list of places you'd like to work at and cold email them. You might be surprised just how receptive they are. (This won't work if you're looking at FAANGs though.)

decafninja 4 years ago | |

I've been working 10+ years in the industry, currently at my fifth company. I've sent out countless resumes, interviewed at countless places. Tiny mom and pop shops, small tech startups, boring cludgy enterprises, all the way up to FAANG.

I have not even once gotten anything more than an automated rejection email from all the companies I've applied to online cold.

The only times I've ever gotten to even speak with a human (leading up to phone screen, interview, etc.) was when a recruiter reached out to me first, whether internal or third party.

Even reaching out to recruiters first on LinkedIn always ends up being ignored.

Yes, I've tweaked and tuned my resume countless times, including having it reviewed by reputable people in the industry.

As far as I'm concerned, applying cold is a straight ticket for my resume into a black hole.

eatonphil 4 years ago | |

An opposite data point: I've hired people directly and through recruiters and I never felt one way or the other based on the recruiter overhead cost or not.

A good candidate is a good candidate and they're hard to find no matter the source.

jayolden 4 years ago |

This is definitely helpful but what if the recruiter spam is coming from linkedin?

toper-centage 4 years ago | |

Quit linkedin then. Or at the very least disable notifications from it.

darraghor 4 years ago | |

you can paste the link in to linked in messages. i just paste it into all of the spam i get once a fortight or so.

unfortunately linkedin don't provide an api or i would do this automatically