haiping: In the main, yes. I have a friend who got a job in the MOE’s programme, but he still had to go through a recruiter. Even when he contacted the MOE directly (because he used to work through them a few years ago), he was still told to go through a recruiter. Recruiters seem to be all the rage. Individual schools rarely have the knowledge or initiative to recruit directly and the government doesn’t want to handle it either (I’m sure someone in government has some connections to various recruiters also because it seems like a massive waste of funds).
The other option is to contact schools directly. This requires them to have the available funds to be able to hire someone (perhaps if you worked at several different places, each school could afford to hire you for a morning here, an afternoon there). It would also require you to have the time to go through that process, which could take quite a while and you’d need to be able to do it in person.
In the end, a lot of it comes down to the level of motivation and organisation of whomever is in charge of English at a particular school as well as the seriousness of the principal to have a full-time English teacher at the school. If those two people are really gung-ho, things can move quite quickly, I think, although in some cases, they may need to get funding from the parents as an extra-curricular programme (even if done during school hours), so they’d have to convince the parents to cough up the cash (not necessarily an easy thing).
There’d also be the issue of your ARC. A school could certainly sponsor you, though you’d almost certainly have to do all the paperwork yourself. They’d probably much prefer someone who didn’t need an ARC through them though.
At the school where my friend works, there are two other teachers that the school recruited, but I don’t know how they went about that. It probably would have been through a recruiter, though I can’t say for sure.
There are also private schools and international schools. The international school system usually recruits through job fairs directly in Western countries, though also over the internet to a much lesser extent. Private schools vary enormously, but be aware that many don’t seem to have the same requirements (i.e. certification) as government schools, from what I’ve heard. I really don’t know if that’s true, but it seems like they have more freedom in that respect, but you can imagine that that quite possibly turns them into glorified buxibans in a sense.
In terms of what you end up teaching, that’s all over the place, depending upon the school and what they would hire you for. You could be teaching the textbook they already have, you could be teaching inane exam prep (at junior and senior high school level), you could be doing conversation classes, or you could be designing your own curriculum. At any point, expect to be cockblocked and told to change things completely by a director of English who not only has no background in EFL, but doesn’t speak a word of English. Without going into a lot more detail, don’t expect to be treated that much more like a professional than someone in the buxiban system.