headhunters setting up bad jobs 265

I am going to go out on a limb, based on my own experience and say that most of the jobs through recruiters are crap, especially those posted by recruiters on job-boards and newsgroups. It is far better off to find your next position from personal contacts or dealing directly with the company (if that is at all possible these days). When a job comes up it is usually filled in the following order:

1. Filled by the company (through internal posting, contact of existing employee, filled by HR) 2. Pbutted to recruiter who scours his contacts and resume database. 3. Ends up on a job board or newsgroup.

By the time it gets to 3 in most cases there is something wrong, either the skills are impossible to fill (ie. 15 years of .NET and 20 years of J2EE), is really low paying considering the position-responsibilities (ie. Software Architect for $50K-year with 90% travel) or is something not worth anyones time (ie. 2 day contract deploying some application under WebSphere that doesn't work).

And yes, if you cannot tell by my tone, I really despise recruiters. Any I have met are without morals, greedy and stupid. And I say stupid because they may not have a technical background, but you would think that after doing a job for more than 10 years or more you would learn something. Like what the buzzwords mean and what are reasonable skills.