Your recruiter is not your friend

That said, the best recruiters I've known don't look at the game like that. Imagine how the real estate business would change if homeowners were selling a house every couple of years. Realtors would want to attract and nurture relationships with homeowners selling the most expensive houses in order to secure many recurring high-value payoffs. They'd also know that "high-value" homeowners are likely to be friends with other high-value homeowners. If they do their best for one homeowner, that one will likely lead them to other homeowners and high-value payoffs.

Of course, there are precious few recruiters who truly take that approach (even though they all claim otherwise.) Recruiters aren't a free lunch. It takes time and effort to find the rare recruiters who truly want you to maximize your career potential. If/when you find one who truly gets it, however, you should try to nurture that relationship. (You both stand to make a lot of money off of each other over the course of your careers.)

My last job hunt ended in an offer through a recruiter. The offer was a 40% raise from the job I was working at the time. The recruiter was initially skeptical about my desired salary range (which was actually lower than I ended up getting offered), but she listened when I said that I'd be able to get that number.

I wouldn't have been able to get that much money without this recruiter's help. I had another offer at that time where the company asked me what I thought was reasonable and just gave me that. The number was ~15% lower than the offer through the recruiter. She had all the data on what other engineers with comparable skills/experience were making, so she was able to help me realize that I was undercutting myself.

To be clear, this recruiter is an exception to the rule. She's certainly not the only recruiter I've worked with, but she's the first and only recruiter I'll reach out to when I'm looking for new opportunities. She's been a tremendous help in my career, and I try to help her whenever I can by introducing her to great engineers that fit roles she's looking for. Pretty much every other recruiter I've worked with has fit the description laid out in this article.

(full disclosure: I consider this recruiter to be one of my closest friends, so my views are surely biased.)

MY recruiter is often somebody i have a working relationship with, i trust to some extent, and I've vetted. The author seems to not understand this dynamic.

I love my recruiters i work with. I make sure they understand and specialize in my industry, have a good reputation, have good connections, i can't talk honestly too, and other intangibles.

Of course a recruiter isn't trying to get you the very best offer in purely numeric terms, and neither should you. But both of you have the same problem and your incentives are aligned: you shouldn't take two more months to secure and extra $5000 since you are giving up way more in foregone salary.

There are a lot of bad recruiters out there, but you need to make am effort to deal with good ones. Don't treat your resume like buckshot and spray it everywhere. Work with good recruiters and you'll be fine.

And stop the recruiter hate. If you treat your recruiters as enemies, instead of valuable business relationships, I expect you'll probably have problems.