I'm going to coin the term "r-strategy recruiter", to borrow from ecology a little. They are a special kind of nuisance during a job search.

You put your resume out there or set your LinkedIn to say you are looking, and they start calling you.

Usually they call from your area code as if they were a robot trying to sell you an extended warranty, but sometimes it's from a major tech hub, or from India. Only rarely from where you are actually looking for a job.

Next, a 10 minute conversation where they ask you things that are on your resume, try to make you low-ball your salary and clarify that you only want software engineering jobs and not all the lovely machine operator, restaurant manager and warehouse technician jobs they have.

Then they send you an email with forms to sign, and if you sign it they send you all the jobs you'd have found on a job board and discarded as unsuitable.

You get to do all the work of applying, except they've already forwarded on a badly mangled version of your resume they copied and pasted into a word document with no formatting.

If one of these leads to a job for one of their clients, they get the fee and they are happy.

It's a perfectly viable strategy for them, but you as the candidate get screwed over. And if you are new to the industry and not good at conflict, it can be really easy to end up working with them just by proceeding through the conversation making the obvious next steps. -Ben