Here's another side of the story: I just moved to SF, and I'm looking for jobs. Two friends sic'd a bunch of recruiters on me, and it is awesome! Here's the process:

   1. They email or call me, and I send my resume and short summary of what I want.
   2. They send me streams of awesome jobs.  (Two have sent bad jobs, but gmail has 
      a hotkey for that :D )
   3. I say I want to talk to XYZ at one of these times, and they hustle to make it 
      happen.
   4. They tell me little nuggets like "The last guy I placed here made $X"

I'm running my own processes in parallel, and I can tell you that they suck a lot more. Non-recruiters -- and even in-house recruiters -- are hard to herd.