> 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.)