Being an agency recruiter in 2017 is becoming impossible in that fewer and fewer people are even willing to talk to you, which is one reason I've diversified into resumes and coaching. I have almost 20 years in the industry, led a large successful users group for 15 years, have published tons of content for tech pros (often critical of recruiters), and have a pretty solid reputation in the industry, I write targeted and friendly approaches (no surprise calls at your desk), and I still have difficulty getting responses from people. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for people who don't have my 'cred' with developers, but the signal to noise makes most people filter out all messages.

So for the most part, I've stopped reaching out to new candidates. Outreach is mostly futile, so my time is better spent doing other things to try and get potential candidates to come to me instead. It goes completely against what recruiting is built upon (always be recruiting, recruit everybody, source, smile and dial, etc.), but when people approach me the outcomes are much more positive.

When I got into recruiting (circa 1998), the primary skill of a recruiter was just identifying potential candidates. There was no LinkedIn, nobody had websites, no social media. The skill was calling into a company and finding out who the Java developers were by navigating different people, and in my case I did this without lying to anyone (there was rusing, but no outright lies).

Now identifying people is ridiculously easy (identifying actual talent is a little different), and so easy in fact that we've turned into an industry of spammers. This model doesn't seem sustainable, and I expect agency recruiters will continue to be replaced by better systems. Nobody seems to have gotten it just right to this point, but some are getting close.