Does it sound familiar? Yes. Have you ever seen this particular ad before? Probably not. So, then why does it sound familiar?

It sounds familiar because it sounds like 99% of the rest of the job postings out there. Except for a few scattered exclamation points, almost all of the 3rd party recruiter job postings basically sound alike -- a generic description followed by a skillset checklist. The ad contains no real information about the work environment, the company, or the product.

This type of ad will not excite a technologist, it will not make anyone want to answer it above the other posts, and in fact it will not make anyone want to answer it at all. An IT job-seeker essentially will flip a coin to decide which of these same-sounding ads to answer, and hope that one of them will be acceptable.

There is simply no way for someone to find a job they would love to work at when the ads all look like this. The end result is that the employer does not get applicants that are passionate about working for the company, working on the product line, or working in the environment. They simply get cog-in-the-wheel responses... because they have placed cog-in-the-wheel ads.

As an employer, is this really who you are trying to hire? Do you want someone with a cog-in-the-wheel attitude? Or do you want someone excellent, someone who is excited about working for you on your products and in your working environment? If you want the latter, then you should be posting direct. It is only with direct postings that you can advertise these additional things that will attract the passionate technologists that you seek.

As a job-seeker, what are you looking for? Is a paycheck all you really want? Just any old company that happens to be working with Ruby, running linux servers, or working in .Net? Or are you looking for more? Perhaps you want to work at a small company where you will have an impact, or somewhere that has sharp people that love to solve problems, or maybe you want to work at a particular type of company or in a certain kind of work environment. If you care about anything other than the bag of skills, then you should be searching direct job postings. It is only with direct postings that you will see enough additional information to be able to find what you are looking for.

Take a look at some of the ads on our board, and you will see the difference. It is striking, and it is self-explanatory.

The highly trafficked "big boards" are pretty much swamped with the recruiter-based ads. Each day there are pages of new postings, and probably 95% of them are recruiter ads. Although you can post direct ads to the boards, they do not stand out and are difficult to find because the boards do not offer any filters to separate out the direct posts. Job-seekers have to manually scan through a hundred recruiter ads to find your one direct posting.

Although we love Craigslist, it has also become home to mostly recruiter ads or anonymous direct posts (which aren't much better than the recruiter ads). And Craigslist is even harder to search through to find the direct posts, because the job-seeker has to click on every single ad to find out who posted it.

There are many niche boards cropping up lately, especially on the popular blogs. These seem to be the current haven for direct posts. The idea here is that the sites are highly trafficked by good IT personnel, therefore the employers will be targeting their posts to the potential job-seekers they would like to hire.

But there are several problems with the niche boards. First, most of the people reading the blogs are not active job-seekers. They are simply, well, reading the blogs. If they do take a side-trip to the job postings, it's often just for curiosity sake. Second, none of these sites receives a significant number of posts and the posts they get are scattered globally. It is difficult for an active job-seeker to use them, because there is a post from his particular area maybe once or twice a month. An active job-seeker may have to track 10 or more niche boards to try to find direct posts in his locale. Even with syndication, this is still a big pain to do; the scatter discourages people from trying it. Third, most of the niche boards are fairly expensive -- for an employer it is not cost-effective to post on multiple niche boards. Overall, it is truly a shame because the niche postings tend to have excellent direct job posts. But it's just too hard to actively use them.

There are also many boards floating around various user-groups. They are good because they are local. But they are not good for direct posts, because they do not provide any filters for recruiter ads. These days, most of the user-group job boards that we have seen are primarily serving as a vehicle for recruiters; perhaps not quite as much as the big boards, but enough that they are becoming a lot less useful for direct job posts.

So, where does that leave the direct-posting community? Pretty much out in the cold, still unable to connect well.

That is why we have started Recruiterless. Our aim is to provide a centralized, well-trafficked venue for direct-posting employers to reach direct-searching personnel. We realize that right now we are small; we fall into the niche category. But our intent is to grow large enough to become the centralized direct-posting source that the IT community needs. To this end, our site is free, moderated, and principals-only.

As far as we know, there are no other job boards out there that will do this... which is why you should use Recruiterless.