This has been going on for a quite some time. There's another side-effect of this strategy that the author doesn't explicitly mention. Even if you're willing to pay the recruiter's fee, you'll sometimes get to the point of making an offer to a candidate and they'll essentially be offended by the offer, since it's lower than the amount listed in the recruiter-overhauled job description that they saw.
I had one candidate ask me point-blank if I was low-balling him because I thought he was under-qualified in some way. It turns out that perception was based on the job description he saw and after I explained that the number he saw wasn't ours, he accepted the offer. But I refuse to work with that recruiter any more.
That cuts both ways, though. A certain company around here was, at least for several months, advertising a large number of job vacancies with far above-market salaries quoted that got them to the top of the various agency lists. However, it became clear during the interview process that they had no intention of offering anything close to that level of salary under normal circumstances. They were also the kind of place that got very stressed if you declined to disclose your current compensation arrangements (as opposed to discussing what sort of compensation you might consider accepting if they offered the job). I'm not sure what happened with that round of recruitment; they were still advertising for a lot of similarly generic positions last time I looked, but all the specifics about salary etc. seemed to have disappeared.
An agency that cut through that level of deception and advertised with a more realistic salary indicator might not have attracted as many initial candidates, but would probably have been more efficient for finding candidates who might actually accept a position if an offer was made, and it would have avoided degrading the employer's reputation in a "small world" employment market, too.
Seems pretty clear that the recruiter provided you with a very valuable service, that the qualified candidates you really wanted to make offers to weren't willing to respond to ads citing the insulting salary range you thought you could get away with.
The simple fact is that if you can not afford to hire qualified developers, you should not be in business. Please leave software development to the professionals who are able to make money at it.
Are you a recruiter or something...? This seems like a pretty hostile comment which is based on a number of assumptions by you.
Why do you assume that we can't afford to hire developers or that we offered an insulting salary? The developer accepted the offer -- he was initially disappointed because of the unrealistic range that the recruiter advertised.
Also, the fact that the candidate responded to the recruiter's ad is indicative of nothing. If I post an interesting job description and 3 recruiters repost it with the details tweaked, many candidates (I know some avoid recruiters) are apt to respond to the first one of the four that they come across.
Your comment about making money seems completely out of left-field. We do make money (been in the black for a decade or so) and if we didn't, your comment seems unnecessarily harsh. So with that comment you ran the risk of being wrong, a jerk, or both.
I had one candidate ask me point-blank if I was low-balling him because I thought he was under-qualified in some way. It turns out that perception was based on the job description he saw and after I explained that the number he saw wasn't ours, he accepted the offer. But I refuse to work with that recruiter any more.