I was headhunted away from a long-running contract by a recruiter I'd been in touch with on and off for years. She pitched me the position, I thought "...that

I was headhunted away from a long-running contract by a recruiter I'd been in touch with on and off for years. She pitched me the position, I thought "...that does sound like me," I interviewed, and got an offer. My two favorite gigs so far I got that way (current one and a stint at MapQuest back when it was in Lancaster, PA). Having a reasonably active GitHub profile helped, too, and has gotten me cold-contacts from people recruiting for Apple and Facebook (didn't pursue either of those because I value living near friends and family more than working for a BigCo [and have never liked Facebook since the first time I heard about it]). I guess my recommendations would be to network and to build up a portfolio of work anyone can see. Networking gets your name in front of a lot more people than you realize, and if you have a portfolio it makes more of an impression it goes a long way towards making people want to contact you. I'd also add to take the time to be polite even to recruiters who haven't done their research. Talking nicely to them as long as they're not just spamming form letters has been a policy of mine for years just on the grounds that they're people too and should be treated kindly. That policy directly got me the referral to MapQuest - when I explained what kind of work I actually was interested in, the recruiter who'd ignored my skillset passed me along to a contact of hers who was looking for devs like me. The resulting gig, while maybe not amazing by Silicon Valley standards, remains one of the best ones I've had here in central PA. (Of course, then upper management cut the entire Lancaster office, the majority of their technical staff, but that's another story...)