I would advise you to go direct where you can unless you are so busy that you do not have time to manage things yourself or you are confident that the recruiter can add real value. I place a small number of high end, hard to find people. One of the challenges I face is that I/we at my firm are often grouped with those who rely on advertising, picking up a few CV's, chucking them down to HR and hoping for the best. The only thing I would add, however, is that you should avoid sending anything to "careers @/info @" etc as a sole means of communication. Try to identify a member of the leadership and send to that person, copied into the standard email address. Before doing this, however, do some due diligence (perhaps by talking to a recruiter or others from the industry) and make a real assessment of your chances. Just chuking yuor CV in and hoping for the best is a waste of time;