[tom_b]

Wish I could give you more points for "must mention actual company name (not just the recruitment agency)"

One of the ways I even find out that a company exists and uses technology <insert your favorite> is to look in the job listings in my area.

Do non-tech job boards wind up with the same amount of recruiter spam I see at the big boards? Or is it some magical artifact of tech recruiting that has staffing companies chomping at the 20% bit of salary to do placements . . .

[mtoddh]

I had the same annoyance with all of the 'company confidential' jobs ads on Monster, craigslist, etc. as well.

My solution was to develop a web crawler that scrapes job adds directly off of the 'careers' pages of company websites. This way I know their not fake ads and I can gather information on each of the companies that I care about, like number of employees that work there, awards the company has won like Best Place to Work, etc...). I wrote up a quick front-end to search the results - and voila - it's a way to bypass a lot of the job boards/recruiter spam entirely.

[BigglesZX]

That sounds fantastic! Is it released anywhere?

[mtoddh]

I have it set up at www.neekanee.com. I generally do scraping runs about once a week. I'm using MySQL's fulltext search on the back-end so it will only let you search for words with 3-chars or more right now (ie, searching for 'c' won't work but 'java' will..).

[BigglesZX]

Thanks. I wonder that too! I am not a fan of recruiters at all, so I have a massive bias there I'm afraid, but it seems that all the companies I want to work for (i.e. midsize, startup or post-startup, cool work for hip clients) eschew recruiters completely and only advertise directly.

I just find it SO annoying when searching for companies that they're all "leading <city> digital agency" and I have no idea who that actually is. Same gripe for "competitive salary"!

I'm only familiar with tech jobs, but experiences of friends in other industries seem to tell the same story - i.e. a carpet-bombing approach to any poor candidate who will listen!