Disclaimer: I&#x27;ve used recruiters to find every job I&#x27;ve had other than the first one.<p>&gt; <i>I&#x27;d rather talk to a company directly.</i><p>Why? What benefit do you get from that? You&#x27;re not like to negotiate a higher salary than you would without the recruiter, and you&#x27;re not in a better position to get hired either (over the total spend of an employee&#x27;s lifespan the recruiter commission is a drop in the bucket). Some companies I&#x27;ve worked for place candidates they receive through external recruiters <i>higher</i> than self-selected candidates because they&#x27;ve already presumably gone through some sort of screening process.<p>A good recruiter will understand what you&#x27;re looking for and won&#x27;t put crap in front of you. That doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;ll get the perfect hand-picked job, and they&#x27;ll probably challenge you on some of your assumptions, but if you&#x27;re a .NET developer they&#x27;re not going to try to get you to take a PHP job.<p>But here&#x27;s how I generally go about looking for a new job:<p>1. Email bosses I&#x27;ve had who I would want to work for again and let them know I&#x27;m on the market. Just a quick &quot;Hi _______, I wanted to let you know I&#x27;m ready for a change from my current environment. If you hear of anything I&#x27;d love to take you out to lunch and discuss the opportunity.&quot; LPT: They will buy the lunch 95 out of 100 times :)<p>2. Email recruiters I&#x27;ve used in the past and send them an updated Word resume, salary&#x2F;commute requirements, and what I want v. my current job (bigger, smaller, different sector, whatever).<p>3. If I&#x27;m very gung ho I will go on Ladders, Indeed, etc but the above typically hasn&#x27;t taken very long to find something.