Managing LinkedIn recruiters making 'cold-call' connection requests

September 4, 2023 11:16 AM

What is best practice for connecting/disconnecting from recruiters who send a solicitation as part of a connection request? Particuilarly if I never hear from them again?

I am a very reluctant user of LinkedIn. As you might expect, my network is even smaller than Spinal Tap's in-universe fanbase. I also seem to be at a point in my career where I am more valuable to recruiters as a notch in their daily phone call quota than as an actual placement. Over the past few years, I would receive many many cold-call connection requests followed by phone interviews that seemed to go well, then... nothing. I politely followed up with a few of them more than once and got ghosted. At one point my network was nearly all cold-call recruiters. So a while back, I disconnected them. As I expected, none of them noticed or followed up.

So, what is best practice for this sort of thing? Can I refuse to connect and still expect to interact with them? If I do accept their connection request, is it reasonable to warn them that I'll disconnect if they don't present me with any more opportunities or even keep in touch? Is there another better way to handle this?

(I also note AskMe's past questions suggest that my general threshold for accepting/making connections is unnecessarily high -- up to now I've only connected to people I've worked with and about whom I feel I can speak knowledgeably.)

posted by zaixfeep to Work & Money (10 answers total)

You can just ignore them!
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 11:43 AM on September 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Just click, I don't know this person. Unless they are power users, they'll never come across your profile again.
posted by parmanparman at 11:51 AM on September 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: (My Ask presumes I want to follow up on the job req they are soliciting. I already ignore the ones that are clearly low-effort/nowhere close to a fit.)
posted by zaixfeep at 11:52 AM on September 4, 2023

If you want a new job now or in the near future, you should connect with recruiters. If you’re going to stay put for a while, ignore them.

Source: I just got a new job this way. It’s what LinkedIn is actually for. The whole social thing is just a disguise.
posted by rd45 at 11:53 AM on September 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

In all honestly, they're mass-connecting with so many people I can't imagine they will care. If there's a chance the connection might be useful to you in the future, accept the connection. This basically allows them to message you and see the rest of your profile on LinkedIn. If you intend on having any sort of conversation with them, they will probably want a connection - anything else doesn't really fit into how they operate. If they don't look potentially useful to you, free free to ignore. If you do connect and find they're messaging you too much, or posting too much stuff you dont want to see in your LI feed, then by all means remove them. But I don't think there's much harm in just accepting the connection or not.
posted by cgg at 12:15 PM on September 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Here's my approach to LinkedIn and cold calls:

1) Do not connect to anyone on LinkedIn unless you specifically know the person and/or have worked with them for more than a month or so.

2) You are totally allowed to ignore connection requests from everyone else. Some are recruiters just trying to build up their network, many are remote acquaintances that want to build up 10,000 connections they will never use. Both are worthless to you.

3) If you do get a cold call from a recruiter and they actually attach a message, reply as follows:

"Thanks for reaching out! If you could please send along a job description I'll be more than happy to review it. I understand you can't say who your client is but please include job title, office location, responsibilities, and expected salary range"

Now, 9 times out of 10, you will be ghosted. That 1 time out of 10 you might get something close to what you ask. You'll almost never get a salary range but now it's in your court to decide if you want to enter an interview cycle. Asking about salary range will spare you going through an entire process and then finding out it's less than what you're making now. Many recruiters will also use the "we will make it work for the right candidate" answer which is a worthless response.

(Bonus tip: most recruiters are lazy and will just cut-and-paste this response. If you cut-and-paste it into Google, you can almost always find a live job posting from the actual employer. A lot of times you'll find 10 other recruiters trying to fill this job. Now you can do more information gathering)

Either way, you're in control here and ignoring random people will never cause you any trouble. Good luck.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:20 PM on September 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

Best answer: I'll only connect to a recruiter if they've provided me with a really solid lead, by which I mean they got me at least to interview stage with a job that's a reasonably good fit. If I connect, I'm doing it because when I'm looking for a job next time, I might want to actively contact them.

J. Random Recruiter might prefer that you connect, but what they want far more is their fee, and they'll happily keep talking for as long as they think you might score them that fee, connection or no.

There's no need to keep a load of connections to unproven recruiters, those folks are ten a penny and if you set your profile to "looking" a whole bunch will show up with no extra effort on your part.
posted by quacks like a duck at 12:51 PM on September 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: You can reply to a connection request as a message without accepting the connection request. I do this all the time, because I never connect with people I don't actually know in real life.
posted by MattD at 1:47 PM on September 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for the responses so far. To clarify, the intent of my Ask is to avoid re-accumulating more cold recruiters, particularly useless ones, than real connections for my LI network.
posted by zaixfeep at 1:58 PM on September 4, 2023

Best answer: Then the answers above are sufficient. To summarize:

- You can ignore connection requests from recruiters. You can drop existing connections with recruiters. It is perfectly normal and nobody cares.

- If a recruiter comes to you with an interesting job, you can transact over messages (great for privacy) and you do not need to accept their connection request.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:40 AM on September 5, 2023