While I agree that someone who only has Perl experience is unlikely to get a lot of headhunter calls, there are plenty of jobs out there which feature Perl in the top three skill requirements. As a 'primarily Perl' developer with a posted resume on several job sites, I receive contacts from recruiters at least once a month for jobs (admittedly, most of them are contract positions) on the West Coast of the US. They do come in fits and starts ... I'll go a while without any contact and then suddenly three recruiters will call me within an hour of each other, often for the same job requisition.

Some recruiters are woefully inept at researching the meaning of the skill sets to which they recruit. Just last week I received an e-mail for a position which had less than a 5% correspondence to my posted resume ... it was pretty pathetic. Many recruiters use poorly developed spam tools ... now there's a job for a good Perl developer -- developing some decent resume- and requisition-scanning tools. :)

As an aside, one of the good deeds I try to do as often as I can is to educate recruiters. Whenever I get a cold-call or an e-mail contact, I am always careful to answer in a polite and cheerful manner. If I am not qualified for the job, I try to communicate that without being too patronizing, and I will often explain to the recruiter what I think they should be looking for. If I am qualified for the position, but am happy where I am (as I am now), I candidly identify the compensation that would be necessary to lure me away (usually well outside their expectation). I hope that this has the happy result of causing them to make a better offer to the person who ends up taking the job.

There are really not very many Perl developers out there in the world. Yeah, there are a good number of script-kiddies and quite a few folks who could, at a pinch, slap together a Perl script to sort through a data file, but from what I can see, there are only perhaps three or four thousand top-quality and experienced Perl programmers in the marketplace -- the kind you would want working with you. It seems to me that there is a window of opportunity right now as companies seem to be hiring Perl developers and market forces seem to be driving up wages, at least in my neck of the woods. This would be a good time to have your resume updated. :)

Update: With respect to compensation numbers, maybe I'm hitting the wrong job boards, but I rarely see a job posting with any kind of specific salary or hourly rate. In my experience (especially with contract gigs) compensation is largely dependent on: (a) how desperate the headhunter is to make a placement, and (b) how strong of a good impression you made during the interview process. If the recruiter is eager to get a foot in the door, you may be able to grab the lion's share of the rate. In a recent six-month (correction:) W-2 1099 contract, I was able to garner almost 94% of the billing rate (although I'm told this is somewhat unusual). If there is no one else who comes close to you in the interview process, then you can generally hold out for a generous salary, whether contract or permanent. When I'm initially communicating with a recruiter, I usually ask them verbally what ballpark compensation they are offering, and then I respond in writing with the minimum rate I require. Sometimes this strategy helps to minimize the waste of your time, by weeding out the lowball artists.

But recruiting Perl developers is hard. Sure, you can weed out the obvious liars and resume-spammers, but how do you identify someone who can be really productive in Perl, or distinguish them from someone who spends all their time writing obfuscations? You can have all the Perl expertise in the world, but unless you also have a strong practical 'just get it done' streak, you can be worse than useless to an employer.

Some developers, even those who are quite intelligent and reasonably proficient in Perl, seek to solve problems in the most elegant and (to me, anyway) counter-intuitive ways. When I have had to clean up after such folks, I have often struggled to make sense of their code. If I was a recruiter for a Perl job, I think I would tend to rely on word of mouth more than anything else ... hence, perhaps, the inefficiency of the market.