Stuart Cam provides a depressingly humorous (and accurate) view of software recruiters in Codebrain Blog | A Day In The Life Of A Software Recruiter. I am regularly contact by recruiters looking for “.NET Specialists” (usually with 3-5 years experience) despite the fact that I’ve never touched .NET. I’ve been an embedded and systems developer the entire time .NET has been in existence. I really can’t fathom what these people are thinking, they are either spamming everyone in their database, or they are getting a (poor) regex hit on the “.net” at the end of my email address.
In any case, I’ve yet to land a job through a recruiter, despite hours spent talking to them. I have occasionally had a recruiter describe an opportunity that I’d already heard about through networking, but that’s as far as it goes. The same holds true for most of the developers I know. The best positions are often not even advertised.