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
Affinity + CodeSignal
Data-Driven, Wholly Human Solutions
Industry
Enterprise Software
HQ
San Francisco, CA
COMPANY SIZE
1-250
PRODUCTS USED
Pre-Screen, Interview
Using AI to Help Business Be More Human
At the core of any business—beyond the marketing, beyond even the product—are relationships. Relationships between people are the heartbeat of any venture, driving partnerships, transactions, innovations, and more. They’re also something irreplaceably human; no matter how far we advance with technology, the relationship between one person and another can never be automated.
While technology can’t replace our relationships, however, it can certainly facilitate and improve them. This is one of the foundational ideas behind Affinity, a San Francisco-based startup focused on relationship management software. While they have no aims to replace human contact with technology, co-founders Ray Zhou, Shubham Goel, and Joe Lonsdale believe that the data we leave behind in our day-to-day communications can help strengthen our relationships.
While most CRM platforms rely on manual data entry—something that’s only as reliable as the person entering the data—Affinity automatically scans its users’ communication streams, cross-checks with third-party databases, and keeps its users’ contact sheets up-to-date. Affinity then uses machine learning to provide its users with reminders and notifications, as well as advanced sorting and filtering options.
Widening the Net Without Losing Time
As Affinity CTO Adam Perelman notes, “the hiring landscape today, especially for engineering, is really competitive,” particularly in Silicon Valley. He goes on to note that “if you want to hire good people quickly—and especially if you want to hire a diverse team quickly—it’s really important to be able to consider all the people out there who could be good candidates.” This means widening recruiting pools—a daunting proposition given that the average engineering role receives hundreds of applicants.
Still a startup, Affinity works with a tight, efficient team; sorting through so many candidates for every open position and ensuring that each one received a fair, equitable shot would simply translate to too much time. Moreover, Adam states that resume reviews proved to be subjective and unreliable in determining candidate skill: “when we go to a career fair or we get an online applicant, from the resume alone, we’re not really sure how strong a candidate might be,” he says. “We want to give them the chance, but we don’t want to spend all of our time on phone interviews.”
The hiring landscape today, especially for engineering, is really competitive. That means that if you want to hire good people quickly—and especially if you want to hire a diverse team quickly—it’s really important to be able to consider all the people out there who could be good candidates.
— Adam Perelman, CTO
Competing for Candidates, Made Smarter
To solve this recruiting dilemma—staying competitive in terms of recruiting without devoting all of their time to it—Affinity partnered with CodeSignal in 2017. Affinity uses several products from CodeSignal’s suite of technical interview and assessment solutions, but Adam points to Pre-Screen in particular as a key tool in broadening their candidate pools in a viable, scalable way. Pre-Screen is a can be used at the very top of the recruiting funnel to quickly identify quality candidates from high volume pipelines. Pre-Screen boasts a library of pre-written coding questions that are scored automatically, powered by over half a decade of machine learning. This automatically-generated score is a candidate’s Coding Score—a first-of-its-kind, credit score-like metric developed by CodeSignal that serves as an accurate, objective snapshot of a candidate’s abilities.
When utilized as a top-of-funnel tool, Pre-Screen can provide users like Adam with faster, more reliable, unbiased results when compared to traditional resume reviews. “It’s really transformed the way we think about the top of our funnel,” he says, going on to say that “now by default, for most candidates, we start off by sending them [a Pre-Screen] on CodeSignal.” By streamlining top-of-funnel recruiting processes, Adam’s talent acquisition team can screen more candidates more fairly and in less time.
Finding top technical talent and moving them through the recruiting process quickly enough to secure them is no small feat. But, like Affinity, CodeSignal is dedicated to building solutions that automatically gather and leverage data to help the humans behind the screens make better, more informed decisions. With CodeSignal’s suite of solutions, Adam notes that Affinity has been able to “broaden the top of our funnel and consider a wider variety of candidates,” ensuring that they stay competitive and are ready to grow their workforce to take on whatever’s next.
How Can CodeSignal Help Your Company?
While Adam highlighted Pre-Screen, Affinity also makes use of CodeSignal Interview—a powerful, all-in-one remote interviewing solution that includes HD audio and video calling, a live, collaborative coding environment, a virtual whiteboard, and more. In addition, CodeSignal offers Tech Screen-–a technical phone screen replacement that gives time back to engineers while providing a white glove candidate experience. No matter your challenge, CodeSignal is ready to help your company #GoBeyondResumes to find and secure the technical talent you need to keep growing.
It’s really transformed the way we think about the top of our funnel.
Adam Perelman
CTO