I've known a couple of pretty good recruiters (and a lot of lousy ones) over the years. The biggest thing not usually discussed is that the recruiting industry

I've known a couple of pretty good recruiters (and a lot of lousy ones) over the years. The biggest thing not usually discussed is that the recruiting industry resembles industries like real estate agents and sales. It's an extremely high-churn, revolving door, of mostly young people with no prior experience, themselves being recruited by agencies to do recruiting. And what happens is, generally, over time the good ones will stick around and will do actual recruiting for maybe 2-5 years or so and after that, generally, will lead (and/or manage) a team of recruiters of a book of business (aka a basket of clients or a region or an industry) and will stop doing individual recruiting pure-play by themselves. Some will also leave an agency and then go to do internal recruiting/HR for a specific company, too. This isn't true, of course, for ALL recruiters, but definitely most. So as you can see, the only downside of finding a really good recruiter is that because they are good, they won't necessarily stay an individual recruiter forever. And the bad ones? Well, they churn and burn out relatively quickly.