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Nowadays software developers (at least in Europe) get a lot of job offers via LinkedIn. I'm always making sure I reply to recruiter in a timely fashion, thanking for getting in touch & explaining that I'm not looking for new opportunities. If I know someone who might be interested in the opportunity, I'm asking recruiter if it is OK to forward the details to other potential candidate(s).

Unfortunately, often those offers have nothing to do with the skills mentioned in the profile. I consider recruiters who do not check skills clearly mentioned in the profile and send an offer completely irrelevant to your skills as being unprofessional.

What's the polite way of replying to someone that they are being unprofessional because of reasons I outlined above. The goal here is to bring their attention to the fact that they leave negative impression and that negative impression equally applies to company they represent. Furthermore, they are wasting time, as whoever receives the offer reads irrelevant text.

Up until now I was ignoring such e-mails, but I'm thinking if I would politely explain the situation maybe they'll pay more attention to it and won't do the same again in the future.

So what would be the polite way of communicating this ?

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  • I don't get the second paragraph (sorry, non-native speaker). Can you please try to explain that differently? As a Full Stack Developer with focus on Web Development, I also get "too many" recruiter DMs on Xing. Many of them are at cities that I don't want to go, nor am I in a search right now. The thing is that many recruiters don't care, they just filter with the premium features and then just copy&paste a text. One recruiter send the EXACT same message 2 days after I politely declined. If they don't get into details about you, it's mostly a prepared message and just found you via filtering. Sep 25, 2018 at 14:31
  • Sorry for not being clear enough. What I mean is you're full stack developer (.NET) but you're offered a Senior Python job, and your profile doesn't have a single word about being even familiar with Python. To me that's being unprofessional. But as your comment & answer by @Martijn implies, I should continue ignoring them. Thanks for the input.
    – Michael
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:34

1 Answer 1

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The most polite way, which is also effective (e.g. worth your time), is to keep ignoring. Keep in mind that they don't care about rejections, they get paid for succesful applicants. You sending a message to them costs them time (to read) with little to no gain.

Recruiters often have a template where they just replace the name and copy/send it, unsolicited:

Hi PASTE_NAME_HERE. I have a challenging job for you, [other fairly general text here].

Often, they implement a kind of "personalised spam", they send it to a lot of people with a very broad filter so they have a higher chance of someone responding positively. It's not very personal, thus it doesnt require a personal reponse.

If you really want to be helpful, it helps to write on your profile that you're not interested for new job oppertunities. This'll cut down the amount of messages.

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