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Customer Story
Code.org + CodeSignal
How Code.org Saves 2,400 Engineering Hours a Year with CodeSignal
Industry
Education
HQ
Seattle, WA
COMPANY SIZE
100-199
PRODUCTS USED
Pre-Screen, Interview
Recruiting costs savings
$
0
k
Engineering hours saved
0
Reduction in average cost per hire
$
0
Why CodeSignal?
When Code.org received 1,000 resumes for one open internship role, Vijaya Manohararaj, Engineering Manager for Teacher Experience, and Jessica Kulwik, Engineering Manager for Student Learning, knew the hiring process needed to change.
Vijaya’s and Jessica’s engineers were already spending too much time interviewing candidates for senior roles, and manually reviewing 1,000 resumes was just not an option. They needed a way to hone in on candidates with the core coding skills their teams expected of new grad interns, without burdening their engineers. And, they didn’t want to rely on imperfect proxies of skills (like the prestige of the university an applicant attended) that can introduce bias.
CodeSignal’s General Coding Framework proved the ideal solution for evaluating candidates’ technical skills accurately and objectively while freeing up Vijaya’s and Jessica’s teams to focus on their core engineering work.
When someone goes through CodeSignal, we can be confident it’s worth investing 6 hours of our engineers’ time to interview them.
Vijaya Manohararaj, Engineering Manager @ Code.org
Adopting CodeSignal at Code.org
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.
Before CodeSignal:
3-4 technical interview stages
After CodeSignal:
Automated pre-screen followed by 2-3 technical interview stages, saving thousands of engineering hours per year
How Can CodeSignal Help Your Company?
Code.org uses CodeSignal Pre-Screen and Interview to save engineering time spent on recruiting and while ensuring the technical screening stage provides a strong signal of candidate skill. CodeSignal’s top-of-funnel technical evaluation solutions help organizations like Code.org streamline their technical recruiting process so that engineers can focus on building great products.
With everything from initial assessments to onsite interviews, the CodeSignal Hire suite helps organizations like yours can identify the right candidates with the right skills to build exceptional technical teams.
I love being able to watch the playback [of the assessment]—it gives really good insight into how people think about the code that they're writing.
Jessica Kulwik
Engineering Manager @ Code.org