If as a recruiter, a job role that is 100% predicated on your ability to work with people, and sell people on why they should ostensibly hire other people, if you can't make even a basic personal connection with someone (you don't have to be their best friend and offer to give them a ride to the interview and wait outside in the car for them to come out-but I can tell the difference between someone who's interested to have a conversation and someone just trying to hit a goal and I bet you could too), probably the recruiting industry is a poor fit, career wise.
It's the product of time and experience, but I can smell a "quota" recruiter a mile away. I do not want to work with them.
Tell that to the mid level exec who's got 200 seats to fill to hit his bonus pot, after which he's outta there. Leaving the company to deal with the 190 terrible coders he hired, naturally.
Extending the metaphor to the most possible extreme of course allows us to make the endlessly convenient counterpoints, but I think this skips over a big portion of necessary nuance to why someone may feel a bit turned off by a robotic, starched and ultimately dispassionate experience with recruiters.
It's the product of time and experience, but I can smell a "quota" recruiter a mile away. I do not want to work with them.