There's another side to the value of headhunters and agencies, at least the competent ones, and that's the ability to warm a pipeline of candidates and do a lot

There's another side to the value of headhunters and agencies, at least the competent ones, and that's the ability to warm a pipeline of candidates and do a lot of the grooming that your regex, no matter how clever, won't be able to do. You can scour LinkedIn day and night for candidates, but especially in software engineering, finding inclined candidates is a much narrower task than finding an engineer with big data experience and experience with GCE. Any recruiters I work with only need to understand how much they need to understand about technical skills to deliver me a workable and most importantly inclined pipeline. It's my job to educate them about subtleties in my requirements. Edit: I should note, these are recruiters I've worked with on an ongoing basis. With cold calls, if they lead with a frag grenade of skills and buzzwords, that's just a bad pitch imo.