Recruiters get put on my autoresponder list. The automatic response says "This is an automated response. Your message was caught by a filter and automatically archived" right at the top, followed by an explanation that I don't work with third-party recruiters. About once a year I check what messages were caught by the recruiter filter and I always discover a few recruiters who have responded (apparently manually) multiple times to my autoresponder, receiving the same response every time. Their messages are usually something like "I understand why you feel that way but we're not like other recruiters, we think you'd be a really good match for X company working with a decaying technology you haven't worked in for 10 years". It's "tenacity", but I can't imagine conversing with autoresponders is very effective.
> It's "tenacity", but I can't imagine conversing with autoresponders is very effective.
Particularly at the bottom end recruitment can be a scummy industry (just like anywhere that's sales and commission led, I suppose).
Back when I worked at a ~100 person company as a hiring manager I had recruiters pull all kinds of crazy. Recruiters submitting fake resumes to find out what positions are open, waiting for me outside the office to shove resumes into my hands, get genuine resumes from candidates not working with them, send them to me, and then claim to represent them...and that's before you get onto the black market for leads and the like.
