Warning: the content below is slightly dramatic but a pretty fair representation of this game.
1) Tell me the salary range up front.
2) Tell me whether you're down with remote up front.
Great, we got past 1 & 2. Let's move on:
3) Let's talk about best practices. These are important to me because it makes my life at work pleasant.
4) Great, show me proof of these best practices you talk about. See, I knew you were a dirty liar. You're not doing <best practice> because Visionary/CEO/Financier/Business person that is guaranteed to make my life a living hell doesn't see the value in it.
If we make it past 3 and 4 (rare), we're onto salary negotiation!
5) Your idea is never exciting enough to where I'll want to do it for less than my market value.
6) Why yes, I do love programming. No, I won't work for less just because I love doing it.
I don't expect engineers to spend any time clicking through profiles though. That's exactly the point, if you're recruiting for a startup you can afford to do things that don't scale (like reaching out the authors of your favorite open source repos, meeting people at conferences and meetups etc). If you need soooo many engineers right now that you need to employ tactics like farming LinkedIn...then we're a bad match anyway.
The point of my original comment was that some people (like me) prefer to be recruited in ways that don't scale because that lets us know that it's a certain kind of company (namely a small-scale startup that is hand-picking their team very carefully). And that's what appeals to me.
I want a list of companies that are looking to hire. I want a list that I can individually research, then find a way to contact them.
There is basically no added value after the initial contact its purelly taking advantage of the situation in order to insert themselves as a middleman with interests often different than both the contractor and the client.