Here is a bold proclamation and a completely new concept nobody has thought of before: tech recruiting can suck. There, I said it.

Curious to see just how bad it can get, one developer created a fake LinkedIn profile to see if anyone would reach out and offer this… account… a job. It worked; a recruiter pinged them via LinkedIn to say they wanted to talk about a gig.

The job (iOS Developer) was local to the user, and fit their listed experience. The recruiter offered a starting salary of about $72,000 (£55,000) and $20,000 in stock (£15,000).

Not bad, except the LinkedIn account belonged to a Sea Bream.

I was curious to see if a nonsense LinkedIn account would also receive job offers. It does! :D pic.twitter.com/jEx5f0KzKg— Alejandro Ramirez (@j4n0) May 6, 2019

The picture? A fish. The description? It lives under the water. Location? Inside of a pineapple.

Tech recruiting thirst is real. We’re sure this recruiter query was totally (or mostly) automated. As one respondent to the above tweet cleverly pointed out, recruiters cast a wide net (pun!). Even if the pitch was reviewed by a human, it’s unlikely they really recognized the fish as a viable candidate; chances are good they just focused on skills such as "iOS."

(It’s also entirely possible this is fake, but it’s still believable a recruiter would pitch a job to a fish, and that’s the real issue.)

You might be wondering: “Are Sea Breams smart enough to code?” The answer is no, they cannot code, and are not bright sea creatures. An Octopus? Maybe. They pick World Cup winners. Eels? They probably use snake-case, and iOS code is best with camel-case styling.

Sea Bream is great with white beans and artichokes, but not Xcode. Better luck next time, recruiters. There are – wait for it – plenty of fish in the sea.