For the longest time I thought this was entirely unfounded as well. Then I applied for a position with a start-up that seemed quite interesting and I had only

For the longest time I thought this was entirely unfounded as well. Then I applied for a position with a start-up that seemed quite interesting and I had only found out about it due to the recruiter. I went through the whole interview process and the company, who I shall leave unnamed, wanted to hire me. They didn't however want to pay the recruiter fee even though they had explicitly reached out to the agency to do their recruiting. The company's take was that recruiters were worthless and just fucking them out of money; so now that the work was done they wanted to bypass the recruiting firm and hire me directly and pocket the fees. Ultimately I walked away from the whole thing because I didn't want to work somewhere with such questionable ethics at the top.