The two snippets that cover 90% of my LinkedIn messages

It is not hyperbole to say that at least 90% of my direct messages on LinkedIn can be replied to with two stock responses.

I wanted to share those responses with you in case they help you.

I tweak these often, I will try and remember to update this post when I do.

Responding To Recruiters

I know there is a running joke about recruiters and LinkedIn. There are lots of terrible recruiters out there, just like there are lots of terrible developers (it is almost like people can be terrible, regardless of the job they do). The majority of recruiter messages I get are at least semi-targeted. The problem is the vast majority have either missed that I’m a contractor, or have some stipulation that doesn’t work for me.

My default response to these messages is:

Hi there,

Thanks for getting in touch.

This link explains our current status: https://tosbourn.com/recruiters/

I could have the content of the link as the body copy of the reply, but in previous iterations of that page we had a way for recruiters to sign up to a mailing list to be told when we were looking for work.

Responding To Outsourcers

I don’t know if this is a symptom of whatever titles I’ve earned over the years, but more and more I’m getting messages from companies looking to enable offshoring or nearshoring for us. This has always made me smile because 90% of the time they are asking us to give them the work that we would otherwise be doing.

My default response to these messages is:

Hey there,

Thanks for getting in touch. We aren’t looking to outsource any of our development tasks at present and expanding to do so isn’t on our radar.

We’re a small development company working in the UK, mainly on Ruby on Rails projects and doing CTO/Tech Lead style consulting. If any of your clients need something like this we’d be happy to chat more.

The easiest way to stay in touch if we were to change our offering to include outsourcing is check out our site https://tosbourn.com or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/19658308/

Thanks, Toby

I’m low-key asking the outsourcer to send us work, which as of the time of writing has resulted in 0 leads, but it takes me seconds to reply.

How I Respond

The tool I use to quickly have access to these snippets is TextExpander, I really, really, recommend it. So much so that I’m an affiliate of theirs (and that is an affiliate link). I have a TextExpander review if you want to read more.

With TextExpander I can type recruiterno or outsourceno and they will get replaced with the aforementioned snippets.

This post was never meant to be about TextExpander. You could copy and paste from a text file, or use any number of different text replacement tools.

Of course you could do the more grown up thing and ignore messages that you don’t think deserve a custom response, that is something I’m trying to get better at.