There are tech focused recruiters who do a good job of filtering candidates and can even do a great job at filtering coding skill. To your other point the most

There are tech focused recruiters who do a good job of filtering candidates and can even do a great job at filtering coding skill. To your other point the most clued up and experienced candidates will have an idea about the recruiter they would use if not an existing “relationship”. E.g. if you’ve been hiring and came across a good recruiter you’re likely to go to that recruiter for your personal search. Maybe you need to start your candidate search with a search for the right recruiter. Advertising on Reddit and Stack Overflow etc is fairly low return for the effort because it becomes a full time job answering queries and doing filtering (unless you have an in house recruiter in HR who can do this).