Are there alternatives to recruitment agents?

I came across this article recently - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/sep/23/problem-recruitment-software-jobs. It is written from a UK perspective but is definitely applicable to the situation we find ourselves in in South Africa.

Basically the author looks at “reframing the needs of candidates, employers and the agencies”. First he looks at things from an employer’s perspective and notes that recruiting by receiving CV’s from a recruitment agency can be an arduous process. He then explains that with software companies paying recruitment fees up to 20% of a candidate’s annual salary, the software companies are losing money that they should be investing in themselves, and that this fee may be a factor in an employer’s decision when choosing between candidates. Also, the fact that recruiters generally won’t understand the software industry in enough detail to effectively screen candidates is inevitably mentioned. Up until this point, the article mentions nothing that we haven’t heard before.

However, he then turns the argument on its head and suggests that the problem actually lies with the candidates and employers themselves. He suggests doing research on companies that you’d like to get a job with (look for them on the internet, hear about them via mates, see them out and about in the tech community etc.), and then contacting the company directly with a cover letter, some examples of your work, a CV etc. This obviously depends on the companies reciprocating by having job specs, contact details and some useful information for potential employees posted on their website. Using LinkedIn nowadays is also another easy way to get in touch with relevant people within an organisation. The author says “To be honest, if someone wrote to me with a nice covering letter and spoke about open source projects that he or she liked, pointed me at a Twitter feed where they were intelligently engaged in the problem domain, and sent me some code that they'd written, they'd be more or less hired at this point” and I would imagine that a number of other employers in our industry would feel the same.