Like many experienced software engineers, I receive a steady stream of email contacts from recruiters. Most of these emails don’t contain important information such as the compensation range for the role the recruiter is selling. Companies who aren’t serious about hiring talent need to be filtered out to avoid wasting time. To solve this, I set up a script to automatically reply to recruiter emails asking for the compensation range.

I followed Jeff Carpenter’s Setting Up a Recruiter Auto-reply Bot as a guide to set up automatic replies to recruiters in Gmail using Google Scripts.

Reply template

The purpose of the auto reply message is to ask the important questions right away. Identifying preferences and dealbreakers from the start saves everyone time.

I wanted the message to clearly identify itself as an automatic reply. For fun, I decided to personify my template as a robot with its own name. I settled on this:

Hi and thanks for reaching out! I’m Stephen’s friendly robot, Waffles. Stephen receives a high volume of employment opportunities, so I help get his eyes on the right ones.

Help me out with the following questions and I’ll get your email to Stephen in a jiffy!

  • What role do you have in mind for Stephen?
  • What is the compensation range and breakdown for this role, such as salary/equity/bonuses/etc.? See Stephen’s LinkedIn page for context or leveling purposes.
  • What is the remote work policy for this role?
  • Does this role require availability outside of business hours? Stephen is based in Seattle, in the Pacific time zone.
  • Does your company require 1) an uncompensated non-compete following employment or 2) mandatory binding arbitration?

Thanks so much!

- Waffles

Organizing recruiter emails

I have a Gmail filter that catches most of my recruiter emails into a Recruiters label. Most recruiters include their title in their email signature, so this filter simply matches the words “recruiter,” “recruiting,” “sourcer,” or “sourcing” and applies the label. Once in a while when I get an email that doesn’t match the filter, I just label it manually.

Script setup

I borrowed Jeff Carpenter’s script as a starting point. I modified it to use an HTML template that lives with the script for the reply content. I also set each thread to be archived when sending a reply, to move the initial recruiter contact emails out of my inbox. Here’s my version:

// Recruiter auto reply bot
// Adapted from https://www.jeffcarp.com/posts/2019/recruiter-auto-reply-bot/

// Configuration
const LIVE_MODE = false; // @TODO Change to true when ready to deploy
const GMAIL_SEARCH = 'label:Recruiters after:2021/07/04';
const MAX_THREADS = 3;

function init() {
  const myEmail = Gmail.Users.getProfile('me').emailAddress;
  if (!myEmail || myEmail.indexOf('@') === -1) {
    throw new Error('Error fetching my email.');
  }

  // Fetch threads
  var threads = GmailApp.search(GMAIL_SEARCH, 0 /* start */, MAX_THREADS);
  log(`[${myEmail}] fetched ${threads.length} thread(s) matching "${GMAIL_SEARCH}"`);

  threads.forEach(function(thread) {
    const messages = thread.getMessages();
    const firstMessage = messages[0];
    const lastMessage = messages[messages.length-1];

    const threadFrom = firstMessage.getFrom();
    const threadSubject = firstMessage.getSubject();
    const threadDate = firstMessage.getDate();
    const threadAge = daysSince(threadDate, Date.now()) + ' days ago';
    const threadHasReplies = messages.some(function(message) {
      return message.getFrom().indexOf(myEmail) !== -1;
    });
    log(
      `[thread] ${threadHasReplies ? '(skip) ' : ''}` +
      `From "${threadFrom}" [${threadSubject}] -- ` +
      `sent ${threadAge} on ${threadDate}"`
    )
    if (threadHasReplies) {
      // Skip threads where I've already replied to any message.
      return;
    }

    if (!LIVE_MODE) {
      log(`[reply] Would send to ${lastMessage.getFrom()} [${lastMessage.getSubject()}]`);
      return;
    }

    var htmlBody = HtmlService.createHtmlOutputFromFile('reply-template').getContent();
    lastMessage.reply(
      "This is an HTML email message. " +
      "You'll need an email client that understands HTML to read this email.",
      {
        htmlBody: htmlBody,
      }
    );
    log(`[reply] Sent to ${lastMessage.getFrom()} [${lastMessage.getSubject()}]`);

    if (thread.isInInbox()) {
      thread.moveToArchive();
      log(`[archived] Thread from ${lastMessage.getFrom()} [${lastMessage.getSubject()}]`);
    }
  });
}

// ***** Utility functions ***** //

function log(msg) {
  // Log to both Logger and console.
  // Logger for development, console for Stackdriver logging.
  if (LIVE_MODE) {
    Logger.log(msg);
  }
  console.log(msg);
}

// Takes two Unix timestamps in milliseconds.
function daysSince(dateA, dateB) {
  return Math.round(Math.abs((dateA - dateB)/(24*60*60*1000)));
}

I then formatted my automatic reply template as HTML, and saved it as an HTML file within my Google Script project:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<p>
Hi and thanks for reaching out! I'm Stephen's friendly robot, Waffles.
Stephen receives a high volume of employment opportunities,
so I help get his eyes on the right ones.<br />
<br />

Help me out with the following questions and I'll get your email
to Stephen in a jiffy!<br />

<ul>
<li>What role do you have in mind for Stephen?
<li>What is the compensation range and breakdown for this role, such as
    salary/equity/bonuses/etc.? See Stephen's <a
    href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/smkent/">LinkedIn page</a> for context or
    leveling purposes.
<li>What is the remote work policy for this role?
<li>Does this role require availability outside of business hours? Stephen is
    based in Seattle, in the Pacific time zone.
<li>Does your company require 1) an uncompensated non-compete following
    employment or 2) mandatory binding arbitration?
</ul>

Thanks so much!<br />
<br />

- Waffles<br />
</p>
</body>
</html>

Deployment

Similar to the original guide, deployment of this script uses these steps:

  1. Create a new Google Scripts project
  2. Copy the script code into the editor and modify with any customizations. When ready, set LIVE_MODE to true.
  3. Make sure the selected function to run is init.
  4. Make sure the Gmail API is turned on. Click the “Services +” bar, select Gmail from the list, and click Add.
  5. Create a new HTML file within the project called reply-template.html
  6. Copy the HTML reply template into the editor, and change the content to be what you want to say to recruiters.
  7. Create a time-based trigger to run the script automatically, by clicking Triggers in the leftmost navigation list and adding a new trigger. I set mine to run once per hour.