Having spent a 3mth contract working on the IT systems for a decent sized IT recruiting company I can tell you that recruiters get rewarded for calling managers

Having spent a 3mth contract working on the IT systems for a decent sized IT recruiting company I can tell you that recruiters get rewarded for calling managers and nothing for calling and talking to candidates. And I find it hard to believe that that a recruiter would actually insist on seeing your references before putting a CV forward so I'd assume that it was a fishing exercise. Another clue is that if the rate is higher than market rate then why would the recruiters not be just taking a bigger cut.