The Headhunter.py Growth Hack

By Eric Casey

• Disclaimer #0: This is a work in progress (Sept/Oct 2020)
• Disclaimer #1: If you're from Linkedin and want this taken down pls LMK.

wtf is this?

This is a proof-of-concept for a bot that conducts wide searches on Linkedin for user-provided lists of job titles (like 'Ice Salesman, Penguin Whisperer, Flat Earther') and locales (like 'Casey Station, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, North Pole') and automatically views each user's profile for a few seconds.

Then, depending on that user's number of connections or notificaitons or settings, they might receive notifications to their accounts.

At what rate you might ask?

Well, if I can get a reciprocal view rate of > 0.03% (a typical programmatic marketing CTR benchmark) I will consider this to be a success.

(If I have results they'll be summarized in ./postmortem.ipynb)

The Story

When I signed up for LinkedIn after business school I quickly noticed that you get a notification when someone else views your profile.

In 2014-ish I was looking for work and noticed that when I viewed a person's profile they would sometimes look at my profile hours, days or weeks later. At that point I had ~50 connections, and at the time, I thought that having that fancy blue 500+ on my profile would help in the future.

The first iteration of this tool was Galaxy-Screen-Scripts and was simply a thumb-recorded screen script using a program that was typically used at the time to make bots for Farmville. All I had to do was search for something like 'recruiter london', start the script, and it would view 1 profile every 2 seconds (throttled a little to let the page load). It got me the 500+ then I stopped, in fear of getting banned.

This time though... I'm going all in using what I've learned since then, and doing my best to document it.

(If I have results they'll be in ./results.ipynb)

Recommendations

Linkedin could mitigate this by setting a internal limit of notifications sent to users stemming from a single user.

There are some gateways with Captcha filters for bots but as long as you don't login to Linkedin on your phone or primary computer then you don't appear to be detected (using a 20s ). After you run this you'll get a the captcha page next time you login (So LI is checking if you're a robot AFTER your robot is done it's job).

See It In Action

* gif here

Results

First Few Days (2020-10-07)

* line graph from notebook here, other vis

Contents

Heads Up: files with * next to them you need to download yourself.

./README.md                   # You're lookin' at it
./headhunter.py               # Main bot script
./postmortem.ipynb            # Analysis of Results. 
./cities.txt                  # Custom list of cities to search in 
./keywords.txt                # Custom list of keywords to search
./chromedriver              * # https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads
./template.json               # DB Record Template
./logs/                       # v- Generated after first run -v
    ./master_user_log.txt     # All users viewed so far
    ./master_query_log.txt    # All queries completed so far
    ./log-dd-mm-yyyy.json     # Log of actions taken by day

Usage

• Tested on Macbook & Raspberry Pi 2

1. ~$git clone https://github.com/EricCasey/Linkedin-Growth-Hack-V2.git

2. Download the correct Chromedriver for your version of Chrome and put it in the project root. Use apt-get install chromium-driver on and ARM chip (rpi)

3. ~$pip3 install shutil signal random datetime selenium

4. ~$python3 ./headhunter.py <linkedin_email> <linkedin_password> <speed> <depth>

Currently Using: ~$python3 ./headhunter.py email@email.mail password 20 100