It’s not uncommon for me to receive random messages from recruiters on LinkedIn. A recruiter’s performance is measured mainly by their ability to find suitable candidates in a quick fashion for open roles at companies. As such, they frequently employ the “shotgun” approach and just send a ton of messages to almost anyone.
About two months ago, I got one of these random, unsolicited messages. Normally, I just ignore them or if I do have time on my hands, I reply and tell them I’m not interested. This message though was from a recruiter at a large company that I had not been in touch with before. Their parent publisher is huge and has one of the most successful video game intellectual properties in their portfolio. Even though, I’m not looking to change jobs, I thought it would be educational just to see what they were looking for.
I replied to the recruiter and after some really short back and forth, he said he’d arrange for me to speak with the main recruiter who would actually give me more details about the open positions at this studio. That indeed happened and I got scheduled to speak with another person, the main recruiter.
The phone call was pleasant and this main recruiter person was trying to sell me on the studio and the parent publisher as great entities to work for. We ended the call with me agreeing to accept this person’s LinkedIn request and that he would answer any follow-up questions I might have. I did have a few questions because most of the conversation was him telling me things about the studio and the team and I didn’t have all the time to ask my questions.
On LinkedIn, I thanked him again for his time and then asked my questions. To this day, this person has not responded to my questions. I was essentially ghosted. Could they have been a bit more professional? Yes, but I’m not really angry or anything. I made it clear that I was sorta just kicking the tires on this and wasn’t even sure if I wanted to start the interview process. I’m sure he had dozens of other candidates who were actually trying to get this job. So, I just left it be.
A few weeks later, I got another message from that first recruiter on LinkedIn. At first, I thought there might have been some bug in the messaging system, because this message was identical to the first one, the only difference was that it was coming from another LinkedIn account, with the same name. I actually had to double-check that I wasn’t going crazy but there it was. I was able to open the messages side-by-side. As far as LinkedIn was concerned, these were two separate accounts, using the same name and business title.
This guy had obviously forgotten we had messaged just weeks earlier. The more I thought about it though, the more weird it felt. Why was this guy using multiple accounts to message people on LinkedIn? Was he messaging so many people that he couldn’t keep straight who he had contacted and who he hadn’t?
It was all very odd and I began to wonder if this guy was even real or if this guy had used his real name or was using a fake one. It also put into question the legitimacy of the phone call I had with the other recruiter. Who were this people? Was this an elaborate scam because there have been scams out there where people pretend to be recruiters for legit companies but aren’t associated with them at all. I hadn’t even given them my resume, so all they knew was my name and my phone number.
I really wanted to respond to this second account and say,”we were just messaging each other weeks ago, don’t you remember?”. It was just too odd and I didn’t want to embarrass the guy, so I left it unanswered.
Then, just last week, a third account, using the same name and business title, messaged me again on LinkedIn, with the same initial message. Three accounts! All of this is way too weird for me to figure out. It’s also coloured my perception about this studio and their publishing parent company, and not in a good way.