Going back to my startup days I like to source good candidates myself, and for a long time LinkedIn was a good enough place for that. There’s always plenty of recruiter spam, but I generally found that a short message from the hiring manager (me in this case) to a 2nd degree connection was well received and more often than not would get a response, even if it was “no, but thanks for asking.”
Recently though, that doesn’t seem to be working. I get that a lot of folks are over the amount of spam there from recruiters doing the spray and pray approach. Have people moved on to anything else in the place of LinkedIn to make themselves searchable without looking like they’re looking for work? Or is the well too poisoned and most people only want the pull model of jobs vs push.
Besides the mostly who’s hiring and who wants to be hired threads here, where are you having success recruiting from for quality senior engineers/engineering managers?