Every now and again, I get calls from recruiter's account-managers ... and those calls contain inquiries of a most unusual (to me, anyway ...) sort.

They are, if I may be blunt, "most banal questions about computer technology."

They are, if I may say, "questions (merely) designed to try to make a salesman not sound totally-stupid."

Which, if I again "may say," is ... stupid.

Perhaps I'm just over-reacting here, from being on the other side of the "typical recruiter's" equation, but-t-t-tttt... "please, if you don't actually know what the hiring manager is asking for in his/her requisition (and why ...), please just don't submit." Really. It's okay. Software is actually a highly-rarified specialty, and, within that specialty, many requisitions are "necessarily filled" with terminology and requirements that are meaningful only to those who truly understand their import. The person who wrote it knew what he was asking for. If you don't ... Therefore, "please, please, please, don't bluff."

If you don't understand what the hiring manager is asking for (and especially, why ...), without the use of a tele-prompter, then please do not respond to him-or-her at all. Don't try to identify the square-pegs that seem to be scattered throughout the requisition and to force "whatever round-peg comes along" into them. Don't think that you are actually saving the hiring manager any time whatsoever by lobbing pieces of junk in their general direction ... and, for that matter, don't think that you are doing the candidates any favors by throwing them blindly towards anything that moves. "Finding a good fit for a technical position" requires much more than "keywords," and if all that you're really doing is "adding to the already too-abundant white-noise," you're just part of the problem. Ergo, "thanks but no thanks."

Just sayin'.

I try to be polite to them, but I'm not sure anymore that this is the right thing to do . . .

Agreed. I used to get all kinds of calls from these "headhunters" and not one of them ever panned out, and they all ended up doing nothing but wasting my time. Having been unemployed at the time, this just made the job hunt more emotionally taxing than necessary, and eventually I resorted to telling the people not to contact me ever again,

It's extra annoying that not one of them understood that Windows admin and Linux admin were NOT the same thing...

Also in this case I think that people are making the mistake of "farming out" the job of trolling through resumes (thousands of them) to "cheaper off-shore laborers," as though they were making cold-calls (as they essentially are ...) to sell Fuller Brushes. In short, the blind are leading the blind.

And when I read that companies "cannot find" qualified labor in IT ... I think that I certainly see a big part of the problem. (In addition to the famous quote about "those who consider price alone" that ends with: "lawful prey.")

"You'd better not try to hire a lawyer that way." Computer programmers are every bit as important to modern companies as are attorneys, and their respective roles are comparable.

There are a couple reasons.

First the recruiters are sometimes evaluated by reports out of their contact software which will show they haven't contacted x person in y days or they only made 100 calls last week, etc.
Second is job postings are written by hiring managers then edited by HR so many times the listing doesn't match what the job will be and recruiters know that so they will try to match anything they think might have a chance of fitting.

... which is why many companies now have their own internal recruiting teams and post positions only on their own web sites. They don't feed the monsters anymore. People who are diligent about finding a job will find them, and there won't be a middle-man demanding money for the privilege of having flooded their inbox.

Candidates simply do not realize that they are become thousands of dollars more-expensive to hire if they come in through a recruiter ... let alone a "try before you buy" contracting house. They're only doing it for money, and they're doing it strictly en masse.