At the top of my LinkedIn profile, I request all messages from new contacts start with a joke, as a friendly way to filter spam. I’ve kept this as the only text in the “About” section for a few years. Going back through my inbox and counting, over half of my messages don’t have a joke in the subject or body.
All these joke-lacking messages must be coming from: 1) bots or scripts (automated spam) 2) humans who don’t read my profile (manual spam) 3) humans who can’t think of or look up a joke (questionably human).
Perhaps someday AI will be effectively applied to recruiting messages and I’ll need a new filter, but until then, this is a fairly effective spam filter.