first of all I totally get why this would be annoying. My inbox is full enough without someone adding in an unsolicited email regarding a job I never asked about. I seriously, totally, completely get it.

But here's the thing. Shitty as it is this is still how hiring works much of the time in our industry. And frankly that email in someone's inbox is either the town drunk wearing nothing but a barrel and puking on their shoes or a knight in shining armor saving them from the dragon's flames depending on that person's set of circumstances.

Companies grow so quickly these days that no one can really afford to prize etiquette over expedience (ethics over expedience is different- no one gets to excuse themselves from ethical behavior).

The whole thing's broken and always has been IMO but I don't have a better way to do it. So I'm asking...does anyone have a better suggestion?

You can always do what every other recruiter I've gotten connections from in the past 2-3 years has done - go to LinkedIn and search for my name there. You're the first recruiter who has shown himself either unable or unwilling to take that step.

Really, go to LinkedIn right now, put in my name and company, and see if I'm not the first result that comes up. and then when you click on my profile, the "Connect" and "Send InMail" buttons are *right there*.

Second, it should be obvious that many companies actively monitor email communications to and from their employees, and some are more paranoid than others. I'd hate to think about what might happen if you emailed someone at, say, Apple, to choose an extreme example.

Not just e-mail, but telephone systems as well. Matter of fact, Chris Woodfield and I worked for an employer who summarily terminated at least one employee for receiving a call from a recruiter on the employee's work extension.

This gives a summary of my position on the matter:

plus.google.com

I'm not joking when I say that people I know have been terminated or threatened with termination by superiors due to recruiters abusing the employer's own communication systems. The employers own those systems, and by cold-calling or cold-emailing a prospect at her/his place of work, the recruiter is placing the existing employee's job in jeopardy.

The IT job market is not stable. No one feels like s/he has "job security". We are all working to jeep what we have.

So because of these risks, I go as far as to "out" those recruiters who do this practice. While you may not think this is a big deal now, that's likely because a lot of people you've harassed via their employers have been very quick to delete evidence of your communication.

I put up with a lot of borderline-unethical behavior from recruiters and still manage to keep a bright outlook on the industry in general. But when it comes down to calling someone at her/his existing place of work -- to woo that person into quitting exactly that job! -- it has definitely crossed the line into unethical and sleazy behavior.

("...keep what we have", of course; apologies on the typo.)

@todd Yikes- I'm not kidding when I say these are new perspectives for me...and I've been doing this for awhile now). That's horrible! (and totally unfair) To be clear I don't call people at work and actually, I rarely email them at work (although obviously I do from time to time).

I guess for me the email address/method of reaching out has always been far less important than the message itself- meaning that I always actually know why I want to talk to an individual person and it's almost always for a specific job. I don't randomly email 200 people with the same boilerplate message.

But this is good feedback for me- as I said at the top I really do try to minimize the suck on these things.

inviting a couple recruiters to the mix :)

I tend to at least try to avoid emailing people at their work address, unless that's what their website/blog/whatever directs me to. That being said, I agree with Jonathan in that, if the email is about a gig you'd kill for, I doubt you'll be overly pissed if it lands in your work email.

No, I'd be just as pissed; and as I've always done in the past, I'd report the incident to my company's HR and IT departments as a possible compromise of private information.

How could you or anyone else possibly know if something is "a gig [I'd] kill for"? If it's that high-profile, what's stopping you from tracking down a different communication channel? Anyone with that level of experience should have plenty of other forms of communication listed on LinkedIn or any number of other venues. It's smug and presumptuous to claim to know what's important to a candidate, especially one you've never dealt with in the past.

But again, recruiters who abuse *employer-owned* communications have crossed an ethical line and deserve to be called out.

I think it's also partly related to what information you make available...if your LinkedIn profile or blog/website that it links to lists your work email, that's the way people will choose to contact you (fwiw I hear way more people complain about being contacted via LinkedIn than through an email address they provide). I agree that, if you have not posted that email anywhere, and someone either guesses at it (firstname@ or firstinitiallastname@) or finds it some other way, that likely crosses the line.