the benefit of shrinking your … team

I’m not sure I agree with this premise at all, but if I’m roleplaying some bloodsucking shareholder who cares more about my own money than the livelihoods of people, or their work/life balance, etc, then I would say that shrinking the recruitment team should only happen once you have senior-level recruiters who know the products, tech stack, teams, and roles well enough that they can quickly and accurately assess resumes against what the company needs, just as fast as a larger but less-experienced team of recruiters could.

it seems like tech is full of imposters jumping from job to job, playing up their experience.

This is played up, in my opinion. I’ve done a decent amount of interviews in the past 5 years (more than 40 candidates, less than 100, but don’t have an exact number), and only one of them I would say gave me ‘impostor’ vibes. There are plenty of candidates who talk up their game, but that is more the fault of companies listing every position as needing far more experience than the roles actually do. People are just optimizing to metrics.

Recruiters cannot spot these people, because they know all the jargon despite having none of the skills. This is why these technical interviews exist, but now those are even being gamed by people by studying leetcode.

This sounds more like someone who “knows enough to be dangerous”, as it were. Forgive my ignorance of leetcode, but a quick glance makes it seem like it’s a Learn to Code website? Is studying coding really gaming an interview, or just studying for the role? Unless your tech interviewers are asking questions directly off of there, doesn’t a candidate answering the questions correctly just mean they learned how to do it? If the questions are about things unrelated to your actual work (like asking people to write a linked list, or a recursive function, etc etc), and people are able to answer those questions but not do the actual work, you should probably stop asking those kind of questions.

There is never going to be a way around having technical interviews; they’re not even primarily there to weed out liars, they’re there to make sure the skills the candidate does have are the right ones for the role. Even if every candidate was 100% honest, you’d still need technical interviews, because 2 completely legit and very skilled backend devs can have vastly different skills or specialties within that realm.

I’d be really curious what a high quality tech recruiter does vs the average.

First and foremost, they work directly with the hiring manager to understand the role, the tech stack, etc. They know the company and their “culture”, and they do their own early vetting of candidates before things reach the interview phase, but after they have reached out to the candidates; asking about salary expectations (or ideally sharing the range for the role), asking candidates how many years of experience they have in ‘x’ maybe top-3 technologies for the role, etc.