I lead one of the companies in this space and it always makes me smile when I see "solving recruiting through machine learning" :D
I think we can all honestly agree that recruiting/hiring will never be "solved", it will always be a laborious task if it's done right and that's simply because we're dealing with people, not data. No algorithm should ever direct your decisions about a human being, we're all too wildly unpredictable for that. No algorithm would have ever given Steve Jobs or Elon Musk a shot.
Sure, we can use tech to help us improve filtering, sourcing, automating, interviewing...to an extent.
At X-Team (my company), we've chosen to not only focus on using tech to improve all of those to help us be more efficient, but I think most importantly we've focused on the one thing no one really talks about: what happens after the hire.
Anyone can start one of these companies, make some decent tech to filter applicants, and then hand off a person to a company for a fee. Easy.
But providing people that will actually stick around after the handoff? Another beast entirely. We're providing X-Teamers, not people spit out of an algorithm on top of a database.
We're providing people who all share the same "keep moving forward" attitude, beliefs, values, people who are all motivated and rallied behind the same energy thanks to our engaging and energizing community experience (x-team.com/join for more on that). When your talent pool is unified and energized, you've changed the game because now it's not just about providing people quickly and accurately, it's about providing consistency among every hire, and you can only achieve that by continuing to invest in those people after the hire.
One example is how we give them all $2,500/year to spend on their passions and growth. TripleByte chucks them out the door and wishes them luck. We hang on to them, we send them around the world to our hackerhouse (x-outpost.com), we challenge them and motivate them (https://youtu.be/Th80vOGFvUE), we become their support arm that unifies them around meaning and energy.
As one client said: "I feel like X-Team shows a lot of love and in turn that gets brought back to our company. I think that they create this ecosystem of growth for the developers that as a company we can't really do."
So we think shaking up hiring isn't just about creating tech that increases efficiency. It's also about providing consistency, ensuring you can get the same level of quality every time you turn on the hiring machine and need a new hire; and since humans aren't machines, that's the biggest challenge of them all and the one we want to keep tackling. :)