In my experience, most recruiters are leeches on the system who only have short-term goals -- place as many as possible, no matter whether they fit, long term reputation be damned. I've experienced this from their telemarketer like calls as well as when I was leading a large project and needed additional help. The recruiters weren't saving me any time -- if anything, they were costing me time and I finally demanded that I interview the candidates that my boss was bringing on. I've never had to work with them on the other side as in 20 years I've never had to search for a job and only interviewed once when I moved to a new area and didn't have existing contacts trying to recruit me.
I recently left very profitable employment to form my own company and to start doing consulting/contracting. So far I've been busy enough just through word of mouth, but eventually I expect that well to dry up since I live in an area without a huge number of tech companies, so I'm starting to put out feelers to build new relationships and find new potential clients.
I imagine there must exist a subset of recruiters who take time to fully vet their candidates and only promote them to companies who are a good fit. It seems that finding one of these could be a win-win. Just like on the hiring side, I don't want to waste time dealing with carpet-bombers. I would love to build a meaningful relationship with one who can get to know me, get to know my skills, seek high quality matches from companies who also value this person's selectiveness and talent pool.
Do such recruiters exist? How does one find them? And on a related note, are there particular recruiting companies (who place corp-to-corp contractors) that have a good reputation in this regard, and any that you would caution me to watch out for?
Very few developers go into recruiting (hint: market opportunity) which is one reason so many tech recruiters are garbage. (90+% of non-tech recruiters are garbage too)