| You just explained why the industry depends on middlemen, especially for your bog standard commodity jobs. Any opening gets dozens of resumes and the people usually aren’t qualified. If you as a hiring manager are working with a recruiter, they can reach people who are “passively looking” and who already have a job. The recruiter I used to get my last job reached out to me about 7 months before I was on the market. I told him that I wasn’t looking for a job until I closed on my house in October, even then I was so busy with life, I wasn’t about to go through all of the hassle of randomly blindly submitting resumes. I told the recruiter that in 6 months, my criteria as far as pay, responsibility, location and technology. He called me 6 months later with a list of jobs and within two weeks I had a job that met all of my criteria and was the Dev lead of a medium size company with a small software development department. On the other side, when I needed to ramp up the department fast with contractors, I worked with him to find qualified contractors. * I want this _specific_ job. I have pretty specific professional interests (in an area that I'm quite experienced in) and aiming high, so there is not a lot of vacancies, that I'd be willing to consider. After filtering for remote-friendliness, what I'm left with is just a few positions. And yet, the seeming randomness of the process makes it unlikely, that I'll be even considered to be put into the interview loop.* If the job is that specific, carpet bombing resumes isn’t the way to go, you’re right. At this point, my next job in two years, is also very specific. While my external recruiter network has been a godsend for the bog standard generic roles I’ve had in the past, I’ve got to start building a network now to get the job I want. Of course if I walk up to the office tomorrow and the doors are closed and they go out of business (not likely), I can reach out to my long list of local recruiters and get the “right now” job or contract quickly that will pay more than enough to support us. |