"You are receiving this e-mail because you attended an event, downloaded trial software or registered for technical white papers from Annoying Software, Inc. To be unsubscribed from all future mailings, including event announcements, please go to http://www.annoyingsofware.com/unsubscribe."

Before downloading your trial software, I made sure I unchecked the option to subscribe to your newsletter.

By insisting and making me:

1) open an unsolicited email about your product;

2) go to a page and enter my email again (as if you don't have it already) to unsubscribe from future mailings,

you are ensuring that I'm not buying your product, ever.

As Seth Godin (bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change) puts it,

You do 95% of it right, then use cheesy fonts or lie a bit or try too hard and boom, that's it.

Pages and blog posts with too many links embedded in the text are annoying.

In-your-face link advertising is the worse type, but even well-intentioned linking can become excessive, as you can see in this post about Wikipedia.

Irrelevant links are distracting. Just because there's a page somewhere on the web about a topic, it doesn't mean you have to link to it.

Seth Godin just shared some learnings from an alternative MBA program he created. One aspect particularly caught my attention:

It's interesting to realize that the way I did the application process certainly changed the list of who applied. Same thing happens with jobs, I bet. Your applicants reflect your methods.

Laura is a star performer. She recently started to apply for jobs with the goal of moving to a smaller city, and she has reported huge differences on the application process of large companies. The criteria she is now using to select where to apply has "user-friendly application process" as one of the most important requirements. Companies that demand that candidates create an account, log in, upload their resume and then enter again all the information (education, previous employers, years worked there, etc.) field by field, are not going to get an application from her. Simpler application processes, which may require registration but allow candidates to choose between copying and pasting your resume or uploading a file, or, even better, offer the option of just sending a resume and cover letter to an actual person, are the ones that she is responding to.

Employers should think about what type of people they are trying to recruit, and adapt their application methods accordingly. This is not to say that companies that create hurdles for applicants to overcome are wrong; it's just that an organization that makes candidates go through a boring, time-consuming process of entering information in specific fields is advertising that flexibility and consideration for employees is not to the forefront in their minds. Candidates like Laura are just thankful that companies are letting them know that so soon in their recruiting process.