The Talent Acquisition Suite from softgarden is a comprehensive solution for companies that want to improve the quality of incoming applications, increase conversion rates, take care of employer branding and make the recruitment process friendly for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. In today’s world, the online behavior of internet users is similar – whether we are thinking of using an application to book a hotel, order a snack or apply for a job.
We want to use tools that give us all the information in a compact way so we can decide quickly. We rely on reviews from other users and we expect every process to be clearly communicated. It’s worth considering in the context of candidate behavior online – gone are the days when companies could afford not to inform candidates about their time-to-interview, or refrain from asking candidates for their assessment of the hiring process.The same is true of the recruiting process itself. And in the case of the most coveted talent, those expectations are even higher.
With the help of tools that allow you to speed up the decision-making process in your company by up to 60%, or tools that allow you to quickly and efficiently assess a candidate’s skills in order to decide on an offer as quickly as possible. In response to this need, softgarden invited Codlity to join the marketplace, which is a hub for partners’ offers and allows to enrich softgarden’s Talent Acquisition Suite with additional features useful for recruiters.Codility is an evidence-based platform that helps hiring teams predict the real-world skills of their candidates at scale. This brings faster hiring, time savings, and gives engineers more time to solve problems that matter.
We asked Natalia Panowicz – CEO of Codility about tech recruitment, how recruiters use their solution and how the pandemic has affected their business.
How is recruiting engineers different from recruiting for other positions?
Natalia Panowicz:Recruiting top engineering talent is difficult because the need far exceeds the available talent. Meanwhile, every company is a tech company and competes for the same tech talent. As companies decentralize, the stage for this competition is now global. Traditional hiring practices where candidates have to jump through a series of hoops to get the job don’t work when trying to find top engineering talent.
The most promising engineers are usually off the market within 10 days, so your recruiting tactics need to be flexible, fast, and enticing to beat out the competition.
If you want great engineers to work for your company, you need to understand what they value. This goes far beyond a competitive salary. In Codility’s State of Remote Work report, we found that engineers find flexibility (in terms of being able to work remotely) and work-life balance more important than salary.
Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey found that developers value learning new technologies, as 75% of respondents said they learn a new technology at least every few months or once a year.
How should a recruiter prepare when planning the recruitment process for technical positions?
Natalia Panowicz:Streamline your tech hiring process from sourcing to pre-screening to technical interviewing to onboarding. There are new technology solutions available to help you create an efficient hiring process. Focus on technology solutions that help mitigate bias and make hiring decisions based on the candidate’s technical skills. Make sure you have access to the talent you need when you need it. Evaluate talent internally to ensure you have the right people you need to continue to grow your business. Identify where gaps exist and try to fill those gaps. Coding challenges can be a great way to attract talent into your pipeline.
Align your business goals with your hiring efforts to strategically plan for the future. Make sure the hiring team is aligned with the leadership team when it comes to the company’s goals and the staffing needed to achieve them.
Find out how we make tech recruiting easier
Let our experts present the Talent Acquisition Suite from softgarden.
Is Codility a tool for hiring managers or recruiters? Do you offer support for recruiters entering IT who have no knowledge of how to review technical applications?
Natalia Panowicz:Codility serves both recruiters and hiring managers. The Codility platform allows recruiters and hiring managers to test real-world skills for all roles, programming languages, and frameworks at all levels of difficulty, conduct remote technical interviews and create sponsored challenges to find candidates. You don’t need to know any programming to navigate Codility’s user-friendly platform.
We offer training videos for those who are new to the Codility platform. These training videos give a general overview of the platform, walk users through step-by-step how to create a test, how to invite candidates to take a test, and for the tech-savvy, we even offer the opportunity to try out a test.Our Customer Success team is ranked #1 on G2 for best relationships. Customer support is at the heart of what we do. Depending on the stage of your plan, you will have a designated Customer Success Manager, who will work with you and your team to support you every step of the way.
What is the profile of the average customer using Codility?
Natalia Panowicz:
Codility serves companies of all sizes in all industries looking to improve their technical hiring process. We have 1000+ clients worldwide and work with the best of the best in technology, finance, government, e-commerce, transportation, and entertainment. Our clients include Microsoft, Amazon, AmericanExpress, Citi, PayPal, Okta, and more. Our plans scale from startups to the Fortune 500, and in terms of the number of engineers companies hire per year, we typically work with companies looking to hire five or more engineers within 6-12 months.
What about a candidate who participates in multiple recruitments for companies that all use Codility? Is there a risk that the test will have to be repeated?
Natalia Panowicz:
The likelihood of this being the case is very unlikely, as different companies have different tests and Codility has an extensive task library that allows for different tasks, even when assessing the same skills.
Do you see the impact of the current pandemic on your business? Is demand increasing?
When the pandemic started, we helped our clients move thousands of scheduled onsite interviews online in a very short time. We have a client base that spans 76 countries and tests candidates from 179 countries – so candidates come from all corners of the globe.
We had to work quickly to help our clients transition to remote hiring and remote work to minimize the impact on the scalability of engineering teams. At the same time, we saw a 3x increase in demand for virtual interviews through our CodeLive platform in the U.S. alone, as companies across all industries have moved from on-site interviews to remote interviews since the pandemic.
Companies are now completely forgoing on-site interviews and relying entirely on remote hiring to fill their gaps. We’ve seen some of our clients interview over 100 candidates globally in a week; these are numbers we don’t normally see in such a short period of time and reflect the incredible increase in remote hiring that is happening right now. We are so pleased to have the right technology solution to help our clients solve their remote hiring challenges.
COVID and the shift to remote working have accelerated technology adoption across all industries, which means every company now truly needs to act as a tech company. This means that proper staffing of the engineering team becomes strategic. Failure to do so will impact long-term competitive advantage.
Natalia Panowicz
Natalia Panowicz is the CEO at Codility, where she has held key roles since joining as one of Codility’s earliest employees. She expanded Codility from Europe into the US, securing $22M in venture capital along the way, and is leading Codility on a mission to increase the problem-solving capacity of engineering teams worldwide.
