I disagree with OP's advice about the job boards. Yes, you will be inundated by cattle-call outsourced call centers. Yes, 90% of them will be: URGENT NEED 6 MO CONTRACT 8+ yr experienced J2EE 35.52/HR.
Totally annoying. My advice: get over it.
You want a job, right? Why limit yourself? Where's the harm? Learning to sniff out the bad recruiters from good is a pretty essential skill in this business. I have really good relationships with a handful of recruiters I met this way that are experienced, professional, genuinely interested in my career and not interested in mismatching. Yeah, I had to get burned a couple of times, and yes I've had to learn to filter out the cattle call, code monkey staff aug stuff. And it's great.
Once you learn to filter and know the good recruiters from bad (tone of voice in the first 30 seconds usually gives it away) you'll find that in the 10% non-crap calls are usually lurking some good opportunities.
Flip this around to the recruiter's perspective. 99% of their candidates and contacts are crap as well. If you actually know what you're doing and have a decent resume, there's a significant percentage of these recruiters who will be thrilled to find you and may actually have some interesting work, if not now, down the line. This has happened for me on a number of occasions.
If you want to avoid annoyances, by all means avoid the job boards. But if you're on the market, don't limit your options by snobbery or fear of annoyance. Learn to filter your calls and sift through the dross -- there may be a great opportunity in there if you're patient.
All completely valid advice however most find job boards a chore so my advice is designed to be a preemptive measure to save people from the standard route of job boards.
Totally annoying. My advice: get over it.
You want a job, right? Why limit yourself? Where's the harm? Learning to sniff out the bad recruiters from good is a pretty essential skill in this business. I have really good relationships with a handful of recruiters I met this way that are experienced, professional, genuinely interested in my career and not interested in mismatching. Yeah, I had to get burned a couple of times, and yes I've had to learn to filter out the cattle call, code monkey staff aug stuff. And it's great.
Once you learn to filter and know the good recruiters from bad (tone of voice in the first 30 seconds usually gives it away) you'll find that in the 10% non-crap calls are usually lurking some good opportunities.
Flip this around to the recruiter's perspective. 99% of their candidates and contacts are crap as well. If you actually know what you're doing and have a decent resume, there's a significant percentage of these recruiters who will be thrilled to find you and may actually have some interesting work, if not now, down the line. This has happened for me on a number of occasions.
If you want to avoid annoyances, by all means avoid the job boards. But if you're on the market, don't limit your options by snobbery or fear of annoyance. Learn to filter your calls and sift through the dross -- there may be a great opportunity in there if you're patient.