We never provide negative info to companies. If you fail our interview, you are free to apply to whatever companies you want on your own.

The practical advantage of going through Triplebyte is that you'll pass more interviews. We match you with companies where you will pass at a higher rate. Because you only have time to interview at a fixed number of companies, this will give you more options, a higher salary (from more competition), and a better fit. We also help candidates negotiate (A big help if you're afraid to do this), and help people with bad resumes (say self-taught programmers) get in the door at top companies. Traditional recruiters do just the opposite (they filter heavily on resumes)

I used Triplebyte when looking for a job recently. The advantage in it for me is that Triplebyte thought about what I said I was interested in and matched me up to a half dozen interesting small companies that I would never have found any other way.

That service is easily worth thousands of dollars to me (and I also used Hired.com for the same thing, where thousands of dollars would have been paid in lieu of my salary if I had been matched up.) Instead all I had to do was spend two or three hours writing some code and talking on the phone.

If there are other recruiters that competently provide this service then nobody told me about them.

"There just doesn't seem to be any practical advantage to using TripleByte over any other recruiter."

Except, of course, that the companies who work with TripleByte probably trust them a LOT to provide great/qualified candidates. Most companies don't trust recruiters very much at all-- some aren't terribly motivated by anything other than closing as many deals as possible, and the vast majority don't know anything about coding. And many/most of Triplebyte's companies probably don't work with recruiters.

Why do you think failing a tech screen with Triplebyte would exclude you from top companies? You could still apply to those top companies easily, no? When those companies get a promising applicant, they don't do pore thru Triplebyte failed-screens data. Even if they wanted to, I presume that information isn't actually available to them.

Cost/benefit-wise seems like it adds credibility and saves time going with Triplebyte unless there isn't 2+ YC companies you are excited to apply to.

We've worked with enough engineers to be confident they're finding value and advantages to using Triplebyte. The feedback has included finding interesting companies (especially earlier stage ones) they'd not known about, skipping technical phone screens (even if you know you'll pass, they still suck), getting feedback on the Triplebyte technical interview, having interview scheduling handled by us, getting a high offer rate and help thinking through offers.

Assuming you can get companies to engage with you (i.e. you already have the right resume credentials) you could invest the time in achieving these same goals yourself as you're saying. For people who don't want to make that time investment, we can save time in a way that other recruiters can't by filtering companies using data about your technical skills and skipping those phone screens. The companies we work with don't trust other recruiters to do this screening correctly.

Our interview also doesn't require taking a day off work, it takes 2.5 hours and is done remotely via Google Hangouts.