Recruiting is a human resources intensive industry where the quality of a firm's output is dependent on the quality of the individual(s) handling your account.

Recruiting is a human resources intensive industry where the quality of a firm's output is dependent on the quality of the individual(s) handling your account. Companies like Triplybyte and Hired who raised gobs of VC with the promise of shaking the recruiting business (with their like totally amazing algorithms and "innovative" testing processes) haven't really done much and IMO are reverting to more traditional models while they leverage their resources to build walled gardens of data with hopes that machine learning will carry them into the sunset sometime soon. In my view the only companies that are innovating are smaller firms and solo recruiters/consultants who have built up a high level of domain knowledge. This isn't so much innovation as just working well and consistently providing good results. This isn't to say all small recruiting firms are wonderkins. But the good ones will not only find you good candidates but help consult and guide you where appropriate (this is especially important for startups). Source: SWE at a small SF based recruiting co. which focuses exclusively on Start-up sales positions. Have been working on modernizing our software stack and have done a lot of competitive analysis over the past year. The people I work with will routinely school me on startups (i'll attempt to show them a new product after reading about its launch on HN and they'll tell me they knew about it two weeks ago).