When I was there last time, all of them were hiring managers and not recruiters. I ended up with 6 companies trying to recruit me, 3 of them were from startups I had never heard of. It was kind of cool seeing companies fight over you, since usually it's the other way around.
Did the companies that saw you at the fair invite you for a more formal interview process, or did they make their minds up there?
Why not? I think it's a great idea, and if technical recruiters "get it" enough so they come to this event, I would actually want to work with them. I bet those won't be the type of recruiters who ask "Well, I see that you have 10 years of JavaScript and PHP on your resume, but do you have HTML?"
What we're trying to do is have one person with the technical chops to figure out if candidates are good and one person with the power to move the candidate's file along in the hiring process. Can you think of an appropriate noun which represents the second group of people? I don't know what the proper parent class of that field is titled.
We are encouraging companies to bring their engineers and recruiters, so that you can talk to someone who knows what you're saying and talk to someone who can actually continue the hiring process.