Getting a phone interview by contacting a company is easy if you have the right resume credentials. If not, you need someone to vouch for you to even get in the door. That's what we're doing for engineers who are strong but lack these credentials and the connections to be referred.

We find that engineers who apply to us even if they have those resume credentials are doing so for two reasons:

(1) People only have bandwidth to talk with a few companies. We have enough data across companies to filter out the ones you won't be a technical fit for. This saves the wasted time of failed onsites, which as you say is the bane of existence for programmers.

(2) Finding companies you wouldn't have otherwise heard about or realized were an interesting option for you. We can especially help here with engineers interested in joining smaller companies that haven't had breakout success yet.

Traditional recruiters only help with getting you an introduction to an arbitrary company (usually whichever responded first to an email blast). We strongly believe that a recruiting service which does intelligent matching provides a lot of value for both candidates and companies (we wrote more about that here: http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-projec...).