How common is it for recruiters to &quot;inject&quot; themselves into the process? I ask this for a couple reasons.<p>I interviewed for a position a while back where the person interviewing me at the end asked, &quot;What firm sent you again? Was it Firm A?&quot; when I had been sent by someone with Firm B. I&#x27;ll also get contacted by recruiters from different firms for the same position.<p>There have also been a couple cases recently where I&#x27;ve been submitted for a position by a recruiter, interviewed with a company, and got a pass or didn&#x27;t hear back at all. And then I&#x27;ll see the position show up a couple weeks later on a site like StackOverflow Careers. I got the impression that a recruiter jumped on an opening they came across and just kind of threw me in there and the company hiring decided they weren&#x27;t getting much in return for the potential money they&#x27;d be laying out. I was pretty well qualified for one of these positions, so I wondered if they wouldn&#x27;t have been more enthusiastic if there hadn&#x27;t been a recruiter between us.<p>My conclusion after about a year of working with a number of recruiters in my area (Southern California) is that the industry is dominated by a few big firms (I refer to CyberCoders as the McDonald&#x27;s of recruiters, but that may be being too generous) and has a lot of turnover. I suspect they have most their success placing more junior developers in less critical let&#x27;s-get-this-seat-filled kind of positions. I&#x27;ve come across a few that I would call real professionals. Unfortunately, they always seems to be focused in areas or locations that don&#x27;t line up with my own.<p>I still look at a number of recruiters emails each week. But now I only respond if I am convinced that they have an actual working relationship with the company they claim to be representing and aren&#x27;t just trying to win some race against the rest of the rodentalia out there.<p>I also put together a page on my wiki for Recruiters to which immediately I refer them any time I am contacted:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;klenwell.com&#x2F;is&#x2F;Recruiters" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;klenwell.com&#x2F;is&#x2F;Recruiters</a><p>This has been helpful in quickly filtering out the most callow practitioners.