<i>I can go onto LinkedIn myself and harvest profiles (as agency recs have to). I can "touch base" with 100+ developers myself if I need to.</i><p>I doubt you can. Not easily, anyway. Think about the social implications for a minute.<p>If you do this in the most efficient way - grab profiles with a simple algorithm, then send the same pitch email to everyone using blind-carbon-copy - you're cold-calling. The problem with cold-calling is that it doesn't enhance your reputation. Do you really want your name and email address filed in the spam filter along with the clumsiest of recruiters? Do you really want to experience the indignity of being unfriended on LinkedIn?<p>Just wait until your amateur spam-o-rama accidentally hits four employees <i>and</i> a hiring manager at another company. They will talk to each other, and figure out that you're attempting to "poach" their employees in the clumsiest possible way, and now your name is mud, twice over.<p>Cold-calling does work, though. (There's no shortage of evidence.) Most of the best candidates don't surf job listings for entertainment, and those few who do are window-shoppers, who have trained themselves to read but not to act. But they might respond to a little poke, when it happens to arrive at the right time. But: You can't be doing that nagging yourself. Frankly, you need a scapegoat. A third party. Perhaps someone whose job description protects their reputation a bit: Everyone knows that recruiters gotta recruit, or be fired.<p>Alternatively, to be kind to your colleagues, you can screen profiles more carefully, making sure not to email people who are obviously not a fit, and making sure not to target the employees of companies run by your friends, and making sure to write lovingly personalized emails to each person, asking about their dog and their kids and then oh-so-discreetly suggesting, as if by accident, that maybe they'd like a new job? This strategy works to some degree - it is, in fact, what most of us do as we wander down the hall at a conference - but it doesn't scale. We call it <i>networking</i>, but when you have to do it with 100+ developers it is a full-time job called <i>recruiting</i>. Perhaps you should consider outsourcing it? And now we're back to square one.