Every time I've gone through the hiring process I contemplate starting my own recruitment agency because to a man (or women) every recruiter I've worked with has been shit. The internal ones are decent but 3rd-party recruiters know almost nothing. It's a revolving door of staff with zero expertise of recruiting and zero understanding of the roles they are hiring for. They are terrible at communicating, will ghost you for scheduled calls, and you have to prod them constantly.

In once case I knew someone at the company I was apply to, the recruiter I was forced to interact with did nothing and kept stalling. Finally I had my friend end-run the process and hand my resume to someone and a day later I had an interview and got the job.

That said, while I know it sucks being on the receiving end, giving feedback is a minefield and not an easy task. I understand the frustration, I've felt it myself many times but being on the other side of the table helped clarify the challenges.

> every recruiter I've worked with has been shit

That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s an obviously solvable problem but companies don’t solve it because incentives push them to this model.

There are of course exceptions where recruitment is well run, but for the most part they want (to the extent that emergent behavior from an institution can want something) useless people doing it.

(As an analogy, it’s sort of the same reason why all corporate training is shit, all HR is dumb, etc. Part of the explanation, but not all of it is the need to give the appearance of doing something for compliance purposes. You need something and to be seen to be doing it, but the quality is irrelevant so you get the worst possible.)