Absolutely not true. Recruiters get between 20-35% of the first year candidate salary. Something like Triplebyte can make hiring better candidates faster, even if it charges the same.

I never used TB, but their model appeared broken. Instead of a tool used by recruiters, they aimed at replacing recruiters.

If any job exists solely because of an inefficiency in information flow, it is at least partially replaceable by tech that fixes that inefficiency, and given time, that will happen.

I'm stating this more as a sort of universal economic axiom, not taking a hit at recruiters specifically as people. They're nice people, but a lot of jobs are replaceable by tech.

Interviewing is a massive information efficiency problem. Companies don't know if I'm good, I don't know if the company is good, so we spend 8 hours on Zoom calls trying to hash it out, and the resulting signal-to-noise ratio is still extremely low in both directions. The interviewer's rubric doesn't give a shit if I was in physical pain that day and had a brain fart or if my ability to code a binary heap in CoderPad is or isn't representative of my ability to code a real world app in VS Code on a real task; I don't know if the interviewer had a work emergency that made them sound like an asshole even if they usually aren't, etc.

Of course they are, but you can slam your solution into the market and try and fight the whole thing. Or you can slip in as a tool that is effective, eventually anyone can hold the tool, not just a master craftsman.

Unfortunately, in a free economy, all ranges of tools will be built and distributed and ultimately the market will decide.

Thanks for the truism, and I am not arguing against a free economy.

One of these reasons these sites failed is they tried to scale to $1B companies, which made sense 10 years ago. They were successful except for scaling. These sites can totally exist as $XX million companies even today.