Are you a robot?

From time to time, I'm contacted by a recruitment agency through LinkedIn. The recruiter usually sends me a LinkedIn e-mail, telling me how (s)he is impressed by my profile. And (s)he offers me to contact him/her about a fantastic job opportunity that (s)he thinks I am a good fit for. The job is then described in a few lines.

For around eighty percent of these e-mails, it rapidly appears either that

• they were sent by a trainee or by a novice, unable to correctly match my profile with a job description, or
• they were sent to a very large number of people, in an automatic way, or
• the only thing the recruiter wants is an access to my LinkedIn network

From now on, I answer with this message:

Hi xxx,

Thanks for your message. But, before I answer you, could you send me back four words that depict my profile, according to you? This way, I can check that you are not just a robot which makes use of LinkedIn data in an automatic way.

Sincerely.

With this answer, I hope to increase the probability to be contacted only by human beings who have spent 10 minutes at least reading my profile before contacting me...