Tell HN: Massive amount of spam from "Who Wants to be hired"
Hey everyone,
I've previously had some success with these threads, but the last 2-3 times I've posted in them, my inbox has just been flooded with spam. Even more so on this last one.
I don't understand why people would think it would be a good idea to spam the people in these threads. People looking for work are already stressed out. You really think you're going to get a good response promoting your brand new Claude generated job board? You think people want to join your community of job seekers so you can promote products to them? Come on. This is a good way to absolutely destroy your reputation.
Then the clearly fake recruiter39923243323@gmail addresses offering to "work together".
My god, those threads are dead to me. I will never post in them again, and I suggest others not to as well.
Last time I posted as a freelancer looking for freelance work and not employment.
The responses I have gotten were all founders of various new job boards or recruitment matching sites. This is not what I was looking for but each of them felt incredibly personalized about the values and priorities of my unique qualifications. I really feel like I can respond to these founders and have a meaningful conversation. None of these felt like spam and I really valued the time they spent writing me a personalized email even if it were a sales pitch or promotion for their product.
In the past my comments seeking employment resulted in nothing.
This also underscores a reality I am learning the hard way as a potential future founder. There is a massive gap between technology people and business minded people. Technology people focus on what I can do for them, self focused. Business minded people focus on value in terms of numbers and scarcity. I would much rather just talk with the business people.
I have encountered the same problem myself. I've switched to linking to an image of a new disposable email address. Zero spam since then. (Actually, zero non-test messages total since then, but that's fine too.) I suppose that will work only as long as not too many people do it, though.
However, there are legitimate companies hiring through those threads. I know someone who got their current job from one of those threads. If you can avoid the spam, I think the benefits outweigh the downsides.
Besides those I have also been getting the fake jobs about a "confidential search" they are working on (yes, from gmail), the jobs that ask you to complete a coding challenge (with malware inside), the people asking me to be their face to attend meetings while they develop the work, etc.
It is insane.
Sadly I think it's any job board that can be easily scraped these days, have had very similar results when posting Reddit "for hire" listings
I don't understand why people would think it would be a good idea to spam the people in these threads. People looking for work are already stressed out.
This paper, Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria? is the basis for whatever insight I have on spamming.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Good luck.