Sneaky recruiters - How to shoot down a baited message politely?

Hi WSO,

When I say "baited messages," I'm talking about instances when recruiters send messages that are purposefully vague in order to pique your curiosity and encourage a response. For example, you may receive a message saying that you are a good fit for a role for "at a F500 client in a [insert exciting-sounding heading] role/department."

After reading a message like this, you know that a job exists, but know nothing about the actual company or job title. Anyways, I tend to reply to messages like these with my email address because there is no reason not to find out, but 99% of the time the solicitations are for companies I've never heard of, don't want to work for, or are overall pretty low-tier jobs.

Is there a way to politely tell the recruiter that I only responded out of curiosity and now that I know what the job/company is I'm no longer interested? It's never a good idea to be rude to recruiters, but it's almost unavoidable at this point. Should I just go ghost-mode and not respond?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

 

If a recruiter is cold e-mailing you or sending you spam mails about vague positions, it's not a recruiter you should be interested in a relationship with (either as hirer or job seeker) and I'd ignore them. At the point they are sending spam like that (ie lowest common denominator, wide net fishing), you're on a list of 100+ recipients and they don't have much bargaining power in the relationship. You don't need to crave their approval.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, post threads about how to do it on WSO.
 

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