Sick of LinkedIn Spam
I don’t tend to check LinkedIn terribly often unless I’m looking for work, but I have been making a slightly more conscious effort to keep it up to date. I’m very happy where I currently am, but keeping it current means less work should something happen right?
Despite putting what I think to be strongly worded disuasion in - “I am not currently looking for new positions, and under no circumstances will I entertain non-remote offers at this time” - I still get the occasional spam from headhunters looking for Windows admins in my area. The thing about Windows is I think I’d rather go work in a slaughterhouse again than be a Windows admin, respect to those who do it. Further, my last real Windows experience (desktops and dicking around throwing packets at virtualized Servers notwithstanding) was Windows Server 2003 - I’m in no way qualified, yet for some reason I keep getting emails wanting me to send them my resume.
So this morning, I’d had enough of it and wanted to see if maybe the “Windows” keywords on LinkedIn were attracting folks despite the fact I’m wholly unqualified. I keep my profile as something of a CV, trying to put as much detail as I can remember, so I didn’t want to completely remove them, but I came up with the idea of simply excluding them from keyword searches.
I dug around and found a script similar to what spammers use to obfuscate text to get past spam filters, and came up with something similar to this:
Linux - Debian, RedHat
Ԝіnⅾоԝѕ ΝТ4, Ԝіnⅾоԝѕ 2000 Ѕеrⅴеr, 2003 Server
Networking and cabling, including some telephony (non-VOIP).
It looks terrible in the font I’m using, but the font LinkedIn uses it’s quite convincing.
Humans see “Windows”, but doing a find in your browser you probably skip right over those lines. I thought it was pretty neat. I’m not sure whether the spam is targetted enough (they could just be carpet bombing anyone who will listen), but it’s worth a shot… I haven’t verified I ever showed up in searches for “Windows”, much less verified that I no longer do, but that’s about the extent of the effort I felt like putting in before work.
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