An AI recruiter emailed 500 words to say nothing
Two months after I launched Obvelum, a bot found my address and sent 500 words of personalised-sounding nothing. Here is how I know, and why it matters.
Just two months after Obvelum was launched, this landed in my inbox. I've removed the sender's name and contact details, but the text is untouched:
I know you are likely not actively exploring new opportunities, so I will keep this brief and relevant. I recently came across your profile and was genuinely impressed by the breadth of your experience across software engineering, DevOps, cloud transformation, site reliability engineering, and enterprise technology leadership.
It promises to keep things brief, then runs for another 450 words.
I read it twice. Not because it was compelling, but because it was such a clean specimen. I'm building a platform whose whole reason to exist is to make this kind of message pointless, and here it was in my inbox, right on cue. So let me do the thing it deserves and take it apart.
How I know a machine wrote it
Start with what it actually says. Strip the padding and there is one sentence of content: I have senior tech roles, want to talk? Everything else is volume. A person with a real job to fill names the job. This one lists eight of them (Senior Engineering Manager, Director of DevOps, Director of SRE, and so on), which is what you write when you have no specific role and are guessing from a profile.
Then the compliments. "I was particularly impressed by your work," followed by a list of my own skills read back to me: Kubernetes, Azure, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk. That isn't admiration, it's a SELECT statement. Something scraped a public profile, inflated each field into praise, and called it personal.
Every list arrives in threes and fives, because that is the rhythm these things fall into. "Technical depth, business understanding, and operational leadership." "Competitive compensation packages, comprehensive benefits, flexible work arrangements, and significant opportunities." It reads like someone being paid by the noun.
My favourite line is the one that tries hardest to sound human:
your experience [...] suggests you have been collecting expertise the way some people collect hobbies.
You can feel the prompt behind it. Add a warm, personal touch. It sits in the middle of the corporate boilerplate like a party hat on a tax form. A person writing this fast and this generically never reaches for that simile. A model does, every time, on request.
The signature finishes the job. A free Gmail address, not a company domain, mimicking the original person's employers from which they stole the identity. A phone number that starts with 555 (!), which is the number film props use when they want a fake one. And a footer that loses track of its own grammar partway through, sliding from "we specialize" to "their role includes," the way text does when nobody is actually behind it.
Why this is worse than just annoying
The easier reaction is to laugh at it. What actually bothers me is that it costs the sender nothing.
No research, no time, no person. Which means the math of a public professional profile has flipped. For twenty years, being findable was good: recruiters could reach you, opportunities came to you, the upside was real. Now anyone can reach you for free, at unlimited scale, with a script that read your profile and pretended to care. When reach costs nothing, a public inbox is worth nothing.
The people this hurts most are the ones actually worth hiring: employed, good at their jobs, not interested in announcing to the internet that they might move. The system as it stands asks them to be permanently public just to be reachable, and then sells that visibility to whoever buys the access. You become the product, and the price keeps dropping.
What I'm doing about it
Obvelum is a bet that the default should flip. Candidates stay anonymous - a past employer becomes [regulated] or [consultancy], never a name. Companies apply to candidates, not the other way around. Nothing public means nothing to scrape, and a candidate hears from a company when it has actually decided it wants them.
It will not fix my own inbox. That email got through because my address is out in the world like everyone else's. But Obvelum is a working version of the opposite idea, and getting the spam two months after I launched felt less like bad luck and more like a product demo I didn't have to write.
If you want to see it, just create your free account (there's no premium, upsells, and everything is accessible day 1). If you'd rather just tell me where the privacy model is weak, I'd honestly prefer that.
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