[vosper]

I agree, ancillary benefits could be just as (or even more) important than salary; in my case salary isn't even in the top 5 things that are motivating me to change my job - even on the low side of the market rate for developers you can have a very nice standard of living.

Personally, other motivations for me include: - Being able to work with a team with diverse skills, who're smarter / more talented than me and can help me to improve myself - Working in an environment where people care about doing quality work - Having a decent amount of leave and a reasonable work day (~8 hours or less) - Having varied and interesting work, or at least not repeatedly building variations on the same theme - Doing something that is good for the world, or at the very least not evil

[lsc]

Yeah, that's all great, but how do you advertise that sort of thing? I mean, as far as I can tell, it's again the "who you know" network- if you know someone at the company, and they trust/respect you enough to be honest about it rather than going for the referral bonus, (and/or if they are honest enough with themselves to not talk up or talk down the company they work for... I am shocked every day by how loyal some people are to employers that can only be described as abusive.) you can find out about working conditions.

But, you know? things are already pretty dang good for those of us that "know people" - If you have a large and functional network, you don't need job sites, and you don't need recruiters. It's been half a decade since I've gotten a job through a recruiter where I didn't pre-arrange things with the decision maker before the recruiter even saw my resume. (quite often for contract gigs at large companies, even if the decision maker knows you and wants you, there is still a body shop in the loop.)

The whole point of recruiters, job sites, and that whole industry is to try to move beyond "It's who you know" and while that is a laudable goal, I don't think they have made a whole heck of a lot of progress, in part due to the intangibles you describe, but eh, I think that communicating the intangibles about the employer to the potential employee has all the same problems of communicating the intangibles of the potential employee to the employer, and neither problem has been solved.