Recruiters are dead. The git log replaced them

A recruiter gets 20% of his first-year salary for forwarding a resume that matches a keyword list. That's a finder's fee of $36,000 for Ctrl+F. And they have the audacity to call it sourcing

What actually works

Open the candidate's public GitHub. Read the last three compiled PRs. You will learn more in ten minutes than a recruiter will learn in ten interviews. Because the code doesn't lie and the resume always does

The resume is a trailing indicator

By the time something is on a resume, it has been edited, modified and completed. The git log is a leading indicator. It tells you what they shipped this week, not what they shipped in 2022 at a company that no longer exists

The replacement

Vetted marketplaces that screen for receipts. Live URLs. Public repos. Shipping statistics that anyone can check. The recruiter was a middleman in a market that no longer needs a middleman

The keyword game is broken

Recruiters are looking for "React, 5 years, AWS, TypeScript." Every senior with a pulse has those words on their LinkedIn. The signal-to-noise ratio is zero. So they fill the shortlist with anyone who matches the regex and call it sourcing

Meanwhile the actual signal... does this person have functions in Cursor in agent mode, do they have a CLAUDE.md that they actually maintain, do they reject half of the suggestions from the model on instinct.... none of that is in the resume. The recruiter wouldn't know what to do with it if it was....

The 81-day racket

81 days on average to fill a senior citizen seat. That's not a market, that's a slow drip designed to maximize fees. The longer it takes, the more "scarcity" the recruiter can sell, the higher the placement fee. The system works exactly as designed, just not for you

The part that stings

If you are still paying recruiters in 2026, you are funding the slowest part of your recruiting process. The average time of 81 days to hire someone is not a market condition, but a recruiter's business model

See receipts →