The problem I see with the "agent" model is that it either short-changes the recruiter, or results in an agency that manages too much talent to offer a personal

The problem I see with the "agent" model is that it either short-changes the recruiter, or results in an agency that manages too much talent to offer a personalised service (i.e. reverting back to being a bog-standard recruiter). A lot of people slate the "fire and forget" cold call approach that many recruiters take, but it works, especially for the more sales oriented recruiters. It's not uncommon for many recruiters in Bristol to make tens of thousands a week in sales for their company through essentially building up a database of developers, a database of available jobs, and essentially recruiting for roles that they don't represent. I worked for several agencies that have interviewed and hired developers via recruiters they had never shared a job spec with. All these recruiters had done was find a public job opening, cold call until someone answers, and send that person in for an interview. If that developer is earning £40k and they're getting 10-15% of that salary as a fee, that's £4k for a bunch of emails. Repeat that for several roles a month and you've made a fair amount of cash. The biggest issue from a candidate perspective is that using a recruiter tends to limit yourself to a subset of companies that are willing to deal with recruiters. A lot of great companies either hire internally, or receive enough spam from recruiters that they threaten day-rates on those that waste their time on cold-calls. The agent model sounds good for high-end developers, but convincing these people that there is someone out there that can sell their skills better than they can sell themselves would be quite tricky. The vast level of domain knowledge someone at that level has built over the years is enough to get them the job.