Honing in on qualified candidates at the top of the funnel

Vijaya and Jessica sent the General Coding Framework to all 1,000 applicants for the intern role, and used their Coding Score—a validated, research-backed measure of a candidate’s skills in coding fundamentals, problem-solving, data manipulation, and implementation—to narrow the pool of candidates to just 10 for live interviews. Of those 10 applicants who made it to the next round, 9 received a resounding “yes” from their interviewers. The General Coding Framework provided a signal of skill that Code.org could trust to hone in on qualified candidates.

“When someone goes through CodeSignal, we can be confident it’s worth investing 6 hours of our engineers’ time to interview them,” Vijaya explained.

The success of the General Coding Framework for screening for the intern role led Code.org to adopt CodeSignal Pre-Screen and Interview for all of its technical hiring, including specialized and senior-level roles.

Reducing engineering time spent on interviews

Jessica was on board. Her team’s current hiring process, where engineers were manually conducting each technical screen in an interview, was taking up too much of their time. And, the resume review and informational interview they were using at the top of the funnel weren’t providing a reliable signal of candidates’ technical skills. 

Now, her team is using CodeSignal Pre-Screen early in the hiring process to identify candidates who meet their technical bar. Jessie trusts CodeSignal’s anti-cheating mechanisms—including monitoring leaked questions, detecting similarity in answers, and monitoring potentially suspicious activity (like AI-generated answers)—to ensure the integrity of each Pre-Screen.

The result, Jessie explains, is that her engineering can “optimize their time for what only a human can measure. They can figure out: what would it be like to have this person as a teammate?”

By interviewing only candidates who meet their technical bar, Code.org has now saved over 2,400 hours in engineering time previously spent on recruiting. Between time saved for both engineering and talent acquisition teams, Code.org has reduced their technical recruiting costs by over $190k in the year since they’ve adopted CodeSignal.

Developing a More Efficient University Recruiting Process

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, Nicole Wright, Rising Talent Lead at Gusto, was faced with a challenge—and an opportunity. Her team of university recruiters had pivoted to other opportunities, but early career hiring remained a priority for the company. It was Nicole’s chance to reinvent the rising talent recruiting program to be even more equitable for candidates and more streamlined for Gusto’s hiring teams.

Nicole first implemented an “agnostic” rising talent approach to reach a wider and more diverse pool of talent. Next, she analyzed the technical recruiting stages and tech stack. Gusto’s previous process required new grad candidates to complete two technical screening interviews, an in-depth technical interview, a hiring manager interview, and a behavioral interview. She realized this lengthy process could be improved to increase efficiency and improve the employee experience by safeguarding candidate time.

To shorten and streamline this process, Nicole needed to find a technical assessment and interview tool that provided a stronger, more reliable signal of candidate skill earlier in the recruiting funnel.

Reducing Engineering Time Spent on Interviews

In 2020, Gusto adopted CodeSignal to replace their previous technical assessment and interview vendors, and to remove one technical screen from the process without compromising candidate quality.

Since then, Gusto engineers reduced the amount of time they spend conducting technical interviews by 850 hours a year —a total of 2,550 engineering hours saved. This was made possible by CodeSignal Pre-Screen assessments, which allow Gusto to ensure a candidate’s technical skills align to business needs early in the recruiting process.

Gusto has also improved the recruiting experience for candidates, who now use just one, cohesive platform for technical evaluation: CodeSignal Pre-Screen for an early-stage assessment, and CodeSignal Interview for final-round interviews.

The impact of this new process is most evident in how engineering interns hired via this new process are exceptionally well-aligned to Gusto’s business needs. This year, Gusto improved their offer rate for interns to convert to full-time new grad hires by 30 percent.

Equipped with a streamlined recruiting process, Nicole continues to build a rising talent program to create even more equity and opportunity for nontraditional candidates to succeed at Gusto.