I imagine it's gotten to that point for a lot of job seekers.
One exception to my experiences was a guy working internally at Google in Switzerland that I had contact with, who hands down was great.
Very satisfied with my recruiter, worth their weight in gold. I bought them a very nice bottle of wine to return the favor.
See technology nowadays it's a lot about buzzwords, and usually recruiters just look for keywords inside resumes. If you dont have one of those keywords, you're off the hook.
Technology hiring, could have another layer of analysis. For example every developer knows that if you've been doing mysql, and php, and web development. You probably can manage a CMS like Drupal or Wordpress. A recruiter would dismiss you for not having one of those in your resume.
Maybe this is good. Maybe not, my point is, job hiring is not only plain resume reading, and they usually dont go beyond that.
Do you have any advice for working with recruiters, beyond basically doing the opposite of what I have been doing?
It does work if you pull all the levers. You can CERTAINLY do your own LIP if you are willing to put the time in and have an acute eye for detail. It is an excellent investment to get it presentable.
Recruiters that specialize in your area are better. I've found linked-in recruiters to be better than job board recruiters. Just put some in demand skills on your profile and they will come to you.
I should also mention this probably works better if you already have a job and some experience and isn't so great if you are just starting or switching fields.
1: Filtering. The downside of the internet making it easy to apply for jobs is that the candidates that do apply, don't tend to be the candidates you want. If you put a job up on Monster / Indeed etc, you're going to get a lot of candidates who aren't remotely qualified for what you're looking for. There's a lot of sifting that needs to happen. If you're a hiring manager you don't want to spend 20 hours initially qualifying and disqualifying candidates, when you can spend 2-3 hours talking to the most qualified people.
2: Talent attraction. A good recruiter finds out what someone wants in their career and then matches them with an opportunity. This sort of discovery doesn't happen that well on the internet.
3: Candidate pipeline management: A lot of companies have stupid complicated interview processes and end up losing a lot of talent that way. If you aren't Google, you can't put people through that sort of thing (and even Google lose a lot of candidates like that).
By and large HN doesn't understand sales particularly well. Selling companies things for $XX,XXX - $XXX,XXX is that you aren't doing the greasy used car / insurance sell. A lot of enterprise is project management with multiple stakeholders. Permanent recruiting is a similar situation.