eBooks
The Experts’ Guide to Increasing Diversity on Engineering Teams
This guide brings together proven strategies from Talent Acquisition leaders at top companies for increasing diversity on your engineering team.
customer story
CakeResume + CodeSignal
Assessing Senior Engineering Candidates
Industry
IT Staffing
HQ
Taipei, Taiwan
COMPANY SIZE
1-250
PRODUCTS USED
Pre-Screen
Making Job-Hunting and Hiring a Cakewalk
Hiring tech talent can be tricky on both sides of the talent coin—it’s challenging for candidates to get noticed and accurately showcase their skills, and screening through large applicant pools to find the most qualified prospects can be demanding on recruiting teams. In 2016, former full-stack engineer Trantor Liu set out to make this process better by launching CakeResume.
CakeResume began as a resume-building service and has developed a database of 600,000 resumes for job-seekers in various technical roles, from front- and back-end to data science to mobile and more. In 2019, CakeResume expanded by launching JobEspresso, a job-matching service which pre-screens candidates on behalf of clients. By partnering with clients on both ends of the hiring relationship, CakeResume seeks to become the biggest tech talent platform.
Scalable Screening Solutions? Piece of Cake
While developing the JobEspresso service, Trantor came upon a challenge that many young startups face—he needed to screen and verify technical talent quickly and accurately, with a lean recruiting team that had a wealth of talent acquisition experience, but didn’t necessarily have technical expertise. As an emerging platform, they needed to quickly establish a reputation for both speed and quality in recommending candidates, meaning they needed a way for non-technical staff to identify top technical talent accurately and efficiently.
Moreover, technical fields are growing rapidly globally. Technical talent is a fast-paced, high-volume market, further highlighting the need for speed and scale. Gareth Cheng, who manages business development for CakeResume, notes that “as the market and our platform continue to grow […] the key challenge here is, how do we match these software engineers and companies directly and in a more efficient way?”
The key challenge here is, how do we match these software engineers and companies directly and in a more efficient way?
— Gareth Cheng, Business Development
With a team of only four recruiting specialists, Trantor knew they needed to find an objective, streamlined way to assess their candidates’ technical skills in order to scale successfully. Trantor partnered with CodeSignal in July 2019, integrating CodeSignal Pre-Screen into their job-matching screening process. Trantor notes that, when choosing a platform, he “evaluated several solutions out there—many of them focused on algorithm assessments only. But as a former full-stack engineer myself, I know that you need much more than algorithm tests, especially for senior roles.”
With a library of over 4,000 coding tasks and support for over 70 programming languages and frameworks, CodeSignal Pre-Screen makes it easy for Trantor’s teams to create role-specific evaluations that directly measure the skills needed for a position. “That’s what makes CodeSignal stand out,” Trantor says. “It provides coding tests for many coding roles, such as front-end, back-end, DevOps, mobile, and data science. Its assessment library was one of the most extensive ones, and the quality of the questions met our standards.”
Janice Lai, former senior recruiting consultant at CakeResume who’s since moved up to managing community and partnerships, highlights CodeSignal’s UI as a key benefit for the recruiting team. She says that “the UI is really intuitive not just for us, but also for the candidates taking the assessment,” making it easy for recruiters to send assessments out at scale and increasing completion rates and accuracy for assessment-takers. “With CodeSignal, we’re saving a lot of time, and we’re able to scale our process while increasing the quality of hires,” she says. “We can be really confident about the candidates who get advanced to the next level.”
Ready for a Recruiting Takeover
Trantor’s team was able to match their first candidate with a position within one week of launching their job-matching service. A React front-end developer, he quickly passed the CodeSignal assessment; Trantor’s team was able to match him with several companies, and he was hired within days. With a successful seed funding round under their belt and corporate clients including Amazon Web Services, Nvidia, and Tesla, CakeResume is positioned to grow rapidly and take over the technical recruiting landscape.
How Can CodeSignal Help Your Company?
With its skills evaluation frameworks, support for over 70 languages and frameworks, and intuitive UI, CodeSignal Pre-Screen was the right choice for CakeResume—but it’s just one part of CodeSignal’s suite of technical assessment solutions. CodeSignal also offers Tech Screen-–a technical phone screen replacement that gives time back to engineers while providing a white glove candidate experience, and Interview-–a powerful, all-in-one remote interviewing platform that includes integrated, collaborative coding environment, HD audio and video calling, extensive language support, and more. No matter your technical assessment challenges, CodeSignal is ready to help your company #GoBeyondResumes.
With CodeSignal, we’re saving a lot of time, and we’re able to scale our process while increasing the quality of hires, and we can be really confident about the candidates who get advanced to the next level.
Janice Lai
Community and Partnerships