It's pretty easy to filter out the bad recruiters (I call them keyword monkeys), though. I have about half a dozen recruiters I trust. All of them contacted me

It's pretty easy to filter out the bad recruiters (I call them keyword monkeys), though. I have about half a dozen recruiters I trust. All of them contacted me with a cold call email after finding me in LinkedIn or elsewhere. Yes, the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad, but you can essentially pattern match the good from the bad really easily based on the emails they're sending out. The bad ones look like templated emails. The good ones send personal emails clearly not sent to anyone else.