Avoid recruiters like the plague. Go to Meetups in your area. Got my current job through doing that and it's awesome. In DC, the custom at tech Meetups is to

Avoid recruiters like the plague. Go to Meetups in your area. Got my current job through doing that and it's awesome. In DC, the custom at tech Meetups is to have a 10-minute "who's hiring" litany before the talks start. I'm pretty sure it's that way in most other cities, too. For mid-to-senior level devs lately, I hire pretty much exclusively from the pool of people I see as regular attendees at deep-language meetups. They are spending their free time getting better at their craft: best 1st-line filter ever.