[shaggyfrog]

As someone who's more of a generalist than not, it's almost impossible to arrange interviews through recruiters -- most of them are only looking to match up acronym/skill/buzzword X with length of time Y. A big part of that comes from missing the technical background to properly appraise the value of those technical skills.

[Homunculiheaded]

I find that's one of the worst things about recruiters, not only do they have a really high number of false positives, they are awful at picking out non-traditional candidates that any engineer would say "wow" to. The only possible function I can think of for recruiters is to shuffle around mediocre, faceless programmers from one large company to another.