[roboben]

Personal contacts. With this, I mostly mean LinkedIn. Found my last two gigs there. Once because an old colleague was reaching out and the other time when I made a post, that I am up for work. There are also tons of recruiters there looking for freelancers, at least for platform engineering I am getting weekly at least 1 or 2 offers.

[poisonborz]

Those are not offers but asking your permission that they can pitch you on a job ad they think somewhat fits. It's like automated job ad submission except you start with a disadvantage as they get up to 10% of your yearly salary.

[benjaminwootton]

I would encourage you to look at recruiters more as partners or as an unpaid sales team. They are out there speculatively busting their ass and building relationships with buyers.

I run my own business and would pay 10% commission in exchange for qualified opportunities all day long.

[Silhouette]

In my experience the biggest problem with recruiters in contracting was always the gatekeeping and control. Normally once they provided an introduction the client could only engage you via the recruiter - even if the role was also available through other recruiters or advertised directly by the client and you could have found it elsewhere as well.

That meant you could find a great client and have a deal lined up with all the key terms agreed and everyone ready to go and then at the last minute the recruitment agency could send you a terrible contract and refuse to negotiate. Then you'd not only have wasted your time going through possibly quite a long process with the recruiter but you'd also be blocked from working with a client who also wanted to work with you for a long time, which makes no business or economic sense at all.

This had been less of a problem a few years earlier when more contracts were direct with clients but the whole software contracting industry was becoming increasingly toxic here in the UK thanks to IR35 and the like. As a result many contracts - particularly with the larger clients who tend to be slightly more reliable about actually starting the work and having the budget for it - have only been available through the client's preferred suppler/recruiter list for some time.

I think if the whole contract recruitment industry got regulated almost out of existence it would probably be a huge boon to the sector. Or just declare that if intermediaries offer contracts in bad faith and won't negotiate - maybe with a list of specific hostile practices that are automatically considered bad faith - then any non-compete terms with either the worker or the client become unenforceable. In fact it might be better just to make the intermediaries generally liable if they act in bad faith because then the ones who waste your time with roles that are never really there and do shady things just to harvest CVs for their database could also be sued for the wasted time at the contractor's normal rate.