When somebody approaches you and you were not looking

Being approached is not the same as being wanted

A message about an opportunity feels like recognition, and that feeling is the first thing to set aside. Most approaches are the output of a search against a set of criteria — a title, a skill, a former employer — rather than an assessment of you specifically. That does not make them worthless. It does mean the flattering interpretation is usually not the accurate one.

Approaches also cluster around whatever the market is short of at that moment, which means a run of them says more about demand for your particular skills than about your standing. Treating it as evidence of your value in general, and making decisions on that basis, is the most common way a casual conversation turns into a move nobody had thought through.

Work out who is paying whom

The person contacting you may be an internal recruiter employed by the company, an agency recruiter paid a fee on placement, or the hiring manager themselves. Those three have different incentives and are worth different amounts of your time. An agency recruiter is typically paid when someone starts, which aligns their interest with a placement happening rather than with it being the right one for you.

None of that makes recruiters adversaries; a good one is genuinely useful and will tell you when a role is wrong. It is simply information that helps you read what you are being told. A message from a hiring manager who can describe the actual problem the role exists to solve is worth considerably more attention than a message that describes an exciting opportunity in a fast-paced environment and names no specifics at all.

Replying costs nothing, and neither does declining

It is worth answering approaches even when you are entirely settled, briefly and without pretending to more interest than you have. The point is not the role; it is that these are people who look at your field for a living, and a short exchange occasionally tells you something about how your skills are being valued that you would otherwise have no way of learning.

What is not worth doing is entering a full process out of curiosity. Interviews consume real time and real emotional energy, and going through four rounds for a job you were never going to take is a cost you pay to find out something you could have established in two questions at the start. Ask what the role actually involves and what it pays before agreeing to anything with stages.

Test it against your current job, not against your worst week

The particular danger of an unsolicited approach is timing. It arrives on a random day, and if that day happens to be a bad one, the comparison you make is between an idealised description of a job that does not exist yet and the specific irritation in front of you. That is not a comparison; it is a mood.

A fairer test is to write down, before responding seriously, what would have to be true for you to move. Two or three concrete things — scope, the kind of work, the pay, the people. Then measure the approach against that list rather than against how you feel on Thursday. Any role can be described in a way that beats a difficult afternoon.

Discretion is a practical concern, not paranoia

Conversations leak, particularly in small industries and particularly where an agency is contacting several people at the same organisation. Handle approaches on your own device and your own account rather than your employer’s, be careful about who you mention it to, and be cautious about a recruiter who wants to know a great deal about your current team before telling you anything about their client.

The rare case worth flagging is an approach that is not what it appears to be — a conversation designed to extract information about your employer, or a role that becomes vague under any specific question. Neither is common, and both are easily handled by declining to discuss anything confidential and by asking for the name of the company before going further.

What an approach is genuinely good for

Even when the answer is no, an approach is a free reading of the market. It tells you which of your skills is currently in demand, what titles are being attached to work like yours, and sometimes what employers are prepared to pay for it, all without any of the effort of a search you initiated.

That is worth collecting quietly over time. The caveat is that it is a partial picture, weighted towards employers who use recruiters and towards roles that are hard to fill, so it is a data point rather than a valuation. And an approach is never leverage in a pay conversation unless you are genuinely prepared to follow it, which is a decision to make before the conversation rather than during it.