HN Explorer

Tell HN: Amazon recruiters scraping HN profiles

40 points by dotBen ↗ HN
Amazon has been scraping HN profiles and dumping email addresses into their applicant tracking software. Nothing you can really do about it but it's lame and should be called out.

I use a unique email address in my HN profile just for HN related stuff (it's hn@<my domain>) and just received a spam from an Amazon recruiter "about the status of my application for engineering management roles at Amazon".

I've never applied to work for Amazon, never used that unique email address anywhere else, also not been an engineer for 10+ years!

This here is partly venting and partly to put others on alert.

6 comments

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helph67
Appreciate you passing the word along!
lapitopi
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

More likely explanation is that Amazon is using a third-party to provide candidate emails from LinkedIn profiles and using that to do proactive reach outs. That third-party is scraping emails from all sources, including HN and providing that as a service to Big companies. Some recruiter at Amazon decided to do an email blast using some generic query based on keywords and got your profile included. QED.

cblconfederate
That's just saying "Never attribute malice if it's outsourced"
sergiotapia
Just say thank you for the opportunity and move along, no need to be mean to people literally offering you a job.
junon
"They're selling your data, you should be grateful!"