Most of the time, when people complain about recruiters, they're complaining about dialing-for-dollars cold-call transactional recruiters.

Recruiting is a special form of sales/marketing, and most businesses wouldn't expect randomly calling people on the phone to be their best early sales strategy. But that doesn't mean they don't do sales; they just execute on an early sales strategy.

Jeff Cox's _Selling The Wheel_ is a good, if somewhat patronizing, summary of the different sales strategies companies use at different stages of the adoption curve for their offerings. The same insight applies to recruiting.