I get emails from two to four recruiters per month. Sadly, most of their emails look like the following, received today:

Ben,

I am the lead technical recruiter at (Company Name). We are a social media technology company sitting atop the social media marketing revolution and are looking to grow our talented team. I came across your profile while doing some outreach. I was impressed by what I saw on your profile and your community contributions and would be very interested in speaking with you about our need for strong Ruby Developers and your career goals. There is no pressure if you are not in the market. I am more than happy to answer any questions that you might have as well.

I encourage you to look at our website (link) to check out our job postings, read about our story, and check out our awards!

Let me know a good time to connect. I look forward to speaking with you.

Thanks,

Kelly (Last Name)

This email sucks for several reasons, but by far its worst offense is that it's not about ME. There's nothing in here that indicates Kelly wants to hire ME, she just wants to hire SOMEONE: another notch in her bedpost. This does not give me the warm fuzzy feeling.

I have never responded to an email of this nature.

As a means of dramatic contrast, let's look at an email from a different recruiter that's so damn good it makes me giddy:

Hi Ben,

I hope you're well. I'm rather certain that you know about Airbnb as you had replied to a thread on Hacker News that I had posted on our need for Rails engineers a couple of months back - (link). We've since added three engineers to the team, remaining selective and adding a couple of front-end talents to our crew.

I was wondering what your current situation is as I had noticed on your Codeulate About page and workingwithrails.com profile stated that you're available. I'm interested in having a chat with you about what we're doing here and whether you would be interested in joining us full time.

Another factor that you might be interested in knowing is that despite being based in Boston, if we thought we would be a great fit for each other, Airbnb would be more than happy in assist in relocating you to San Francisco.

Let me know what your thoughts are!
Barry

I didn't anonymize this one because Barry and Airbnb deserve massive kudos--this is the best damn recruitment email I've ever received.

Barry has read my comments on Hacker News, found my profile on workingwithrails.com, read my blog, and knows where I live. I am physically incapable of disliking someone who strokes my ego so thoroughly. How can you be disinterested in someone so interested in you? Barry's telling me that he's done his research, liked what he saw, and thinks I'd be a good addition to his team. That is a damn good start with one email--if I were interested in moving out to SF, I'd be all over that.

I'd love to see more recruiters copying Barry's approach. You'll get better results and I'll get less spam. I love when everybody wins.