My solution to your initial problem is to have a "note to recruiters" linked prominently at the top of my resume (and linkedin). It covers what kind of places

My solution to your initial problem is to have a "note to recruiters" linked prominently at the top of my resume (and linkedin). It covers what kind of places I'd be a good fit for and vice versa. Things like I am not going to update the recruiter's database, tell me company names, small companies/startups etc. It becomes very apparent very quickly which recruiters have made any effort to read it and if they can't do that, they are unlikely to be paying much attention to their clients either. Since I run my own mail server, I then add the most egregious cases to a block list. (They also tend to be repeat offenders so that problem is solved too.) When recruiting I look at the initial acronym soup. I especially like people who categorise what they are very good at versus ok. Then I look everything else for substantiation and to get a flavour of experience. For example is networking there, mobile, low level languages (eg C), web stuff, Python/Ruby etc. It is generally a good idea to include the acronym soup for each item in the resume (eg if doing a network server say what language and frameworks were used). Open source stuff is excellent because it is actually concrete - something I can look at, and far more informative than generic text elsewhere can ever be. What I am usually ultimately looking for is "smart and gets things done". (Joel has articles with more detail.) The general bad things people do are what appears to be a bulk send, really long but irrelevant cover letters, and not substantiating things. I was looking at a resume this morning where C++ was listed as the first skill yet could find no mention of it anywhere else. It immediately makes me sceptical of everything else listed.