Discount Double Check

Today’s cautionary reminder to know your audience is something of a sequel to Left Hand, Meet Right Hand. It involves a cold email from a recruiter I got two days ago. Which isn’t a rare occurrence by any means, but what was out of the ordinary was that 1) it was from my former employer, despite there being absolutely no indication the sender realized I was a recent ex-Amazonian, and 2) the jobs being offered were at or below the level I’d been hired at back in 2019, a full five years ago. Needless to say, I’m not interested (and I’m not just saying that because my current boss sometimes reads this blog).

Look, I recognize that this email was probably auto-generated from a LinkedIn search, but it’s a recruiter’s entire job to not only find, but adequately entice, qualified candidates. The poor person was hoist on their own petard with the boilerplate about “raising the bar” and “becoming an industry leader.” Failing to do even a modicum of homework is not frugal nor customer obsessed.

It’s not like it would be that hard. Even if the automation was solely LinkedIn based, my entire work history is right there and it’s pretty obvious I haven’t been a mid-level software engineer in ten years. But an Amazon employee could easily do even better, given that there’s robust internal tooling for querying data on current and past employees. I should know, because I wrote some of it. In fact, from memory I bet I could write a Python script that could cross check a list of potential job candidates against Amazon’s employee lists.

Thanks for the chuckle, my recruiter friend. But do better. Open up your browser, go to https://<redacted_wiki_domain>.com/view/Jud_Neer and you’ll find all the resources and documentation you need to avoid this error in the future.