Late last week, whilst browsing Ruby Jobs on a leading online site, I noticed a very curious thing. As I navigated each page, I was being presented with ad after ad of "Ruby" jobs all seemingly connected to advertisers who themselves were a recruitment agency.

So we did some research and collected some data, and what we got was quite surprising. For one particular job board, for every ad posted by an "Employer", there were 6.5 other ads that came from recruitment agencies. Are all these ads really connected to genuine job vacancies? What is the real demand for Ruby development skills down under?"

Just yesterday, Alan was “invited” (via LinkedIn) to connect to an agency recruiter he didn’t know or had any prior connection with. Coincidentally, I was contacted half an hour earlier by another recruitment agency with "suitable applicants". Does this mean that recruiters know of positions that are not advertised at all? Or perhaps they are speculating at the expense of potential candidates and Employers?