It's always been a personal connection.
At the risk of bragging, I'm very good at this stuff.
If you're filtering resumes and doing endless interviews, you're missing out. You won't get people like me.
It's always been a submit-a-resume-and-interview (via an agency).
At the risk of bragging, I'm very good at this stuff.
What's your point?
Edit: This is completely true.
That would be my point.
I would 100% agree that the professional connections have helped me get more jobs and more offers than a computerized/headhunter/recruiter service.
YMMV, but don't discount the importance of making good connections while working.
Tho seriously, here's the question I'd ask of you...
Is that working out for you? It sounds like it's not, since you're still looking.
Maybe it's time to step back and reevaluate your process.
We have a high proportion of surprisingly high quality software engineers, from a number of European nations (a very international mix, now that I think about it). Good people move on, be it moving on within a company or without, and where I work the product is relatively narrow, so people tend to move on by leaving. I expect to be moving on myself within the next two years. When you have more than a dozen or so high quality software engineers, someone is always leaving. I advise the youngsters that if they ever find themselves in the same job and the same role for five years, they need to start thinking about their exit and get on with it.
In my opinion, our process is working well, thank you. There is no whiteboard involved.
This is the sort of comment that might be more advantageous for you if you had contact information in your profile, just FYI.
I have also tried the "know somebody" tack. None of the people I have ever met has ever been able to even get me an actual interview anywhere, with the sole exceptions of my father, who has thrown roughly $1500 worth of business my way over my entire lifetime, and a former boss, who was laid off at the same time as everyone else, yet still managed to toss me $500 in contract work for his one-man startup as the emergency job search stretched out into the second week.
On a gross revenue basis, looking good enough on paper to start a conversation, and spamming out those resumes to anyone even considering hiring someone new has been roughly 400 times more valuable than knowing other people.
But my entire career has also unfolded far from the SF-Oakland-SJ metro area. We don't exactly get a lot of "meetups" around here. I'm not even exactly sure what a "meetup" is. Maybe like a geek night where everybody talks shop all night instead of having fun?
Also, not a single professional recruiter has ever successfully placed me in any job, nor have they even been very good at getting me interviews. They have been worse than useless, in that every second I wasted on them would have been better spent digging up my own leads and sending my resume myself.
All that said, I hate, I hate, I hate the current software professionals' hiring process and the trends in it that I have been able to observe from my end.