I don't understand why a non-technical recruiter would be asking technical questions of a technical candidate, especially to a high-level one. Maybe for college hires, where you need to weed out an overwhelming field of candidates. Maybe Google just gets that many more applicants but jeez, I feel a web form and a minimal machine learning classification could do a better screening job.
Maybe it's more of a case that a technical person was asking the questions but doesn't really care about justifying why they should hire an applicant if they don't say exactly what is written down