It's not uncommon to receive recruiter invites on LinkedIn and other career-oriented sites, often asking for interest in job opportunities and sharing current job experiences. For the first time, however, I received a "sneaky" message:
Hey Brandon!
My name is [REDACTED], and I am an IT Staffing Specialist working on several .NET Development opportunities. As I am not the most technical person in the world, I was doing some research on Stack Overflow, and came across your profile. I wondered if you might be able to explain to me the difference in ASP.net as compared to VB.net, C# and MVC programming? We have opportunities that vary within all of these realms, and I thought you might be able to help me out since you have a lot of experience. Let me know if we could speak briefly, my number is [REDACTED].
Thanks! I hope to hear from you soon!
-[REDACTED]
Now, this very well could be a genuine request. But, I'm leaning towards this being a sneak way to get me to interview with them.
What I'm wondering, though, is should I respond to something like this? Wouldn't it look bad on me if I wasn't able to see through this thinly veiled attempt at a point of contact? Wouldn't the right thing to do be to not answer? I think I'll go with that.
And in case you missed it, Tricia Curry and the @msdevshow hosts read and discussed this on the air. Give the episode a listen (I'm name-dropped a few times, even).