It's like real estate. Recruiting looks like easy money, so it attracts many, many entrants. Only a few are successful enough to stick to it as a full-time job.

The incentives don't make sense. As a realtor, you get a huge, immediate payoff when the house sells. You don't care about the price.

Recruiters are worse. As a recruiter, you get a huge, immediate payoff when your client hires any candidate at any price. You don't actually care how good the fit is, so the rational behaviour is to spray as many candidates at as many clients as possible.

@bumbledraven

Neat idea, but

"All the jobs are in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area. If you're looking to work elsewhere, we can't help you right now. Sorry!"

It's great to have focus, but there's a much larger group of developers out there who A) don't live in those areas, B) don't/can't move to those areas and C) don't want to work at a 'startup'.

Hackruiter looks neat, but I don't think it's 'disruption' in the sense I was talking about. It's catering to a very small niche of people who are risk-takers and probably "off the beaten path" anyway.

I couldn't reply directly to you, so had to do it one level above!

@tomjen...

This has been on my mind for some time (years), but as with many things, it's little more than an idea. But I have many other ideas which are equally compelling, and I'm pursuing yet other compelling ideas right now too.

Just because someone sees an opportunity in a market doesn't necessarily mean that they're the best equipped (or equipped at all) to actually tackle it.

But thanks for the public push all the same.

Instead of just hoping, why not be the disruption?