Exactly the same for me. I have a collection of recruiters who ping me every 6 months or so, at which time I politely stall them off for another 6 months. Anyone who writes a good intro letter gets a polite reply and is added to that (pretty short) list. Anyone who writes a decent but honest letter has a chance of going onto that list, depending on my mood and email load. Anything that smells machine-generated or (worse) poorly human-generated gets dropped or permanently muted. Some percentage of recruiters don't continue to keep going with it, and so naturally drop off the list, which keeps it at a roughly constant size.
I judge intro letter quality fairly harshly, so really about half the list is recruiters who were in-house at places where I interviewed and turned down a job in the past -- they're more likely to keep in touch because they've pre-qualified me, and recruiters have high turnover independent of their quality, so none of them are still with the original company. Especially since most of those companies are long-dead startups.
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Exactly the same for me. I have a collection of recruiters who ping me every 6 months or so, at which time I politely stall them off for another 6 months. Anyone who writes a good intro letter gets a polite reply and is added to that (pretty short) list. Anyone who writes a decent but honest letter has a chance of going onto that list, depending on my mood and email load. Anything that smells machine-generated or (worse) poorly human-generated gets dropped or permanently muted. Some percentage of recruiters don't continue to keep going with it, and so naturally drop off the list, which keeps it at a roughly constant size.
I judge intro letter quality fairly harshly, so really about half the list is recruiters who were in-house at places where I interviewed and turned down a job in the past -- they're more likely to keep in touch because they've pre-qualified me, and recruiters have high turnover independent of their quality, so none of them are still with the original company. Especially since most of those companies are long-dead startups.