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Companies use recruiters mostly because they feel they have no skills to perform hiring themselves, when they have no HR staff etc. Most of them are unaware that recruiters actually make quality hiring nearly impossible, through ignorance, misrepresentation of facts or open lies.

Companies seem not to know that developers generally avoid recruiters and seek a direct contact. I had it many times that recruiters ruined potential opportunities for me as a candidate, that is why I said them goodbye a long time ago.

With the way recruiters approach their work today, I'm convinced they have no place in the IT hiring process and actually do more harm than good. They have no qualifications to perform their job well and none seem to be even remotely interested in obtaining the necessary knowledge. Recruiting seems to be a short term job - today they hire programmers, tomorrow they end up in the sales department of a manufacturing company and will be selling tires, the day after that they'll be doing something else. It probably makes no sense to them to be wasting time learning something weird when they can spend this time cold-calling and selling whatever stuff they're on today.

Update. Almost forgot. Sometimes people go to recruiters to relieve themselves of the responsibilities for a potential bad hire. Employing the services of a staffing company will make the person look like acting in the best interests of the company, and if a bad hire happens here, it can easily be attributed to the failure of the staffing company, not to the mistakes of the person who hired recruiters.