I think it's assumed from the article (and the screenshot of the Gmail trail) that the team members have explicitly stated that they don't want to be bothered and don't work with recruiting agencies, this is a total last ditch effort.

At our ~20-person startup, we have a few recs open and I still see multiple people get calls on their mobile phones from recruiters over and over, and in the majority of these cases they don't even know how the recruiter got their number.