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Ask HN: How are recruiters “finding my linkedin” when I dont even have one?

9 points by s09dfhks ↗ HN
Curious if anyone else is experiencing this. I frequently receive emails from recruiters asking if I'm interested in positions. When I ask how they found me, they usually respond with linkedin, which is odd because I deleted my account years ago.

I asked one recruiter to send me the URL of "my profile" and when I had a co-worker view it, it returned a "profile not found" page.

Does linkedin have some feature you can pay for to see deleted accounts?

9 comments

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gjvc
Your name and LinkedIn URL and some categorisation are probably on someone's old spreadsheet somewhere.
nartz
Pretty common - recruiting firms often have application tracking systems and databases of resumes, profiles, that essentially have been scraped from all jobs sites accessible across the web.

Rarely will anything get deleted, so they might have multiple versions of your linkedin profile because maybe it was scraped multiple times as you changed it, or often even your resume if you posted it publicly anywhere that they scraped.

bluewater
+1 to this. ATS (applicant tracking systems) like Bullhorn integrate with LinkedIn allowing a one click import of your profile. If you weren’t a first degree connection or didn’t have a public email listed they most likely used some software that grabbed your info from a social profile.
benologist
They just say that to pretend they aren't (illegally?) spamming you after having obtained your information without consent from someone who (illegally?) obtained it from LinkedIn and is (illegally?) retaining your PII forever.
AznHisoka
That's the oldest trick in the book. Along with spamming people and saying "I found you through FB" when asked how they got their email.
barry0079
My old company did exactly this. We would remote log into out clients computers and beging scraping all of their linkedIn contacts and 'signing' them up to our service for them to use as recruiters. This still happens post GDPR.
benologist
Wasn't that already illegal prior to GDPR?
barry0079
You're correct. More punishable is probably more fitting.
stevekemp
Recruiters? Lying? That's shocking!

(But more seriously I suspect they have done searches/exports in the past, and have scraped a lot of data.)