Here’s a recent discussion and some personal stories and lessons based on what little experience I have:
Do you check local sites like JobsDB or Jobstreet? (which ones?) Do you check international sites like jobs.github.com? (which ones?) If you’re a recruiter, where do you find your prospects?
Like most developers, I also get a lot of “Do you know other developers?” when it comes to filling up job openings. Implicitly, developers know developers and they have a sense of how a friend works that is not quantifiable, since measuring programmer skill is vague depending on the conditions and the organizational setup.
“See a job posting, Submit a resume, show up for an interview” is common for entry-level positions but is the exception for upper-level job positions. For upper-level job positions, a friend is the best resume you’ll ever need.
It’s better if you talk directly to the company, not a recruiter. Most recruiters have a set of requirements they need and a deadline to hit, they don’t really care about culture fit, development environments, etc. etc. Most of the time they’ll just tell you the estimated salary, they can’t promise anything else like perks and what not.
International job sites: Part-time Remote Work found in these sites are better than going to freelancer job sites where the competition is how low you can go for margin.
On crowd-sourced talent recruiting, I saw a good solution at HN, though I can’t find the link to it. Hopefully I explain it clearly: A friend of yours will post that you’re looking for a job, via a tweet or the app itself along with a really short profile about yourself (relevant skills, number of years in the industry, etc.). Your name will not be shown so that no one knows who you are, since its kind of weird if your current boss sees it. Your friend’s followers/friends who are interested in looking for a dev sees your friends’ tweet and anonymously contacts you or sets you up for an interview via the twitter card or the app itself. Experience-wise it seems easy and simple for users.
To answer the questions:
1) Back then I do check it, but now I just ask around my network since JobsDB and Jobstreet are filled with recruiters (have bad experiences with recruiters). Depending if I have a contact in a company, sometimes I contact the company directly and show them something really quick I made that’s relevant with the company, such as a simple redesign of the front page of their website, or something really simple that they can use internally built in their preferred tech stack. I also include the process in which I approached this problem. But this only works if I’m past the HR, again, depends on the organization and if I have a contact in there.
2) Job board at 37signals.com, Job posts on HN (highly recommended), and Careers at Stackoverflow. Most of my freelance contacts are due to contributions to open-source, through my portfolio at wrapbootstrap or referrals from my friends.