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
Cohesity + CodeSignal
Scaling Up and Saving Time
Industry
Infrastructure Software
HQ
San Jose, CA
COMPANY SIZE
1,000-5,000
PRODUCTS USED
Pre-Screen, Interview
Disrupting Data Management
Storing, managing, and protecting data often presents a serious challenge. As companies grow, data becomes increasingly fragmented as it is stored in multiple silos across varying locations, getting duplicated, corrupted, and even lost. This presents companies with a host of issues as they scale; storage becomes increasingly expensive, information becomes difficult to access, and, perhaps most significantly, data is left vulnerable to attack.
These are problems that Mohit Aron became intimately familiar with while working on the Google File System, and they’re problems he set out to solve when he founded Cohesity in 2013. Using what he learned at Google, Aron developed a data management platform that consolidates storage, makes data accessible with an intuitive UI and a host of supported applications, and protects data with sophisticated backup and security solutions. Cohesity’s solution has grown to be trusted by major players across a wide range of industries–from tech leaders like Cisco to ivy-league universities like Brown and the University of Pennsylvania to national organizations like the United States Air Force, the IRS, and NASA.
Cohesity founder Mohit Aron
As a leading innovator in data management, Cohesity has been experiencing significant growth–their valuation more than doubled between their two most recent funding rounds for a total of $2.5 billion, and their subscription-based software model has driven a 150% increase in recurring revenue, a 100% increase in customers under data management, and a 135% increase in customers utilizing Cohesity’s cloud services.
Saving Time Without Sacrificing Quality
Such strong, consistent growth has driven Cohesity’s need to scale their talent acquisition process. Given that talent acquisition is both a highly time-sensitive and time-intensive process, recruiting manager Naresh Kasula knew that one of their biggest challenges in scaling their hiring channels was going to be saving time without sacrificing quality or experience.
In particular, technical talent acquisition places a lot of demands on an organization’s engineering teams. Bringing on a new employee takes a lot of resources, and while recruiters can reduce the burden by screening candidates at the top of the funnel and managing logistics throughout the process, it’s still the engineering team that has to create and review assessments, host onsite interviews, and give feedback. It’s estimated that while filling one position takes approximately 15 recruiting team hours, it takes at least 40 engineering team hours–that’s a lot of time for engineers to spend away from their own projects, and it can have a serious impact on productivity when a growing company needs to undergo a hiring surge.
…while filling one position takes approximately 15 recruiting team hours, it takes at least 40 engineering team hours
Another complication that arises when scaling up technical hiring that gives both recruiters and engineers pause: cheating. At-home assessments are a great tool for quickly screening candidates and can be efficiently utilized at all stages of the recruitment funnel for any role; they can also improve candidate experience by allowing applicants to complete the questions on their schedule. While data on the prevalence of candidate dishonesty on coding evaluations for hiring purposes is hard to come by, it’s a very real concern that hiring teams take into consideration when it comes to making decisions based on these results. Given how many resources go into filling a position, it’s imperative that any candidate who gets an offer genuinely has both the skills and the character needed to succeed in the role.
With these considerations in mind, Naresh needed a way to both reduce the demands on Cohesity’s engineering team while also ensuring candidate honesty throughout any remote portions of the hiring process. While other coding assessment platforms incorporated anti-cheating and proctoring measures, the tests still had to be written and the results interpreted by engineers to effectively screen candidates.
Time-Saving, Trustworthy Results
Cohesity partnered with CodeSignal in 2019 for help with scaling their talent acquisition process. Pre-Screen is a first-of-its-kind skills evaluation that can be used at the top of the funnel to quickly identify quality candidates in high volume pipelines. It utilizes over half a decade of machine learning to generate a Coding Score–a credit score-like number that provides a snapshot of a candidate’s technical skills. Cohesity’s talent acquisition team finds a candidate’s Coding Score to be a fast, easy-to-understand, and accurate measure of a candidate’s potential–”I feel like you know that once a candidate passes a CodeSignal test or gets a certain score on it, you know that they’re going to be top-tier candidates and they’re going to be able to pass the technical bar really easily” says university recruiter Chanel Perrone.
Using a candidate’s Coding Score eliminates the need for the engineering team to interpret a candidate’s results, making it possible for talent acquisition professionals to utilize it at the very top of the hiring funnel to quickly and reliably screen high volumes of candidates. This reduces both the total time of the hiring process and, specifically, the time burden placed on engineers.
Naresh identified CodeSignal’s advanced, automated proctoring and plagiarism detection as a key benefit of Pre-Screen. Pre-Screen uses a candidate’s webcam to verify their government-issued ID and ensure that it’s the candidate and only the candidate completing the assessment. In addition to this remote proctoring protocol, CodeSignal also checks a candidate’s assessment against an extensive database of previously-submitted solutions to check for potential plagiarism with a high degree of accuracy. Checks are run on every piece of code submitted and returned to your recruiting team as an easy-to-interpret Similarity Score. CodeSignal also produces fair and consistent variations of questions, with over 1 million variations in circulation, making it nearly impossible to cheat. Recruiting and engineering teams can rest assured that their candidates’ Coding Scores are truly their own and move applicants through the funnel with confidence.
Naresh also noted that Cohesity’s engineers value Pre-Screen’s replay feature, which allows users to play back a recording of the candidate’s coding session. Not only does this provide an additional layer of plagiarism protection, but it also allows those reviewing the candidate’s work to gain insight into their problem-solving process. “If they have any sort of confusion in their mind, they can always go back and see how [the candidate] coded,” says Naresh. How a candidate approaches and thinks through problems is a valuable metric when making hiring decisions; being able to watch, re-watch, and analyze how a candidate writes their solutions provides engineers with invaluable insights that they can build off of during an on-site interview.
Ready to Scale for Whatever’s Next
With CodeSignal’s help, Cohesity has been able to scale their talent acquisition pipelines and significantly reduce the amount of time their engineers spend on recruiting. Optimizing their hiring process allows Cohesity to consider a wider pool of applicants, helping them diversify their workforce and find diamond-in-the-rough candidates. As Naresh states, “because of CodeSignal, we can reach out to more candidates and make sure that everybody gets a fair shot.”
As they continue to grow and mature as a company, Cohesity will need to be able to continue scaling and optimizing their hiring process. Cohesity recently brought on Robert O’Donovan, an alumni of DataStax and Pivotal Software, to serve as the company’s first CFO–meaning big things may be on the horizon for them as they enter a new phase of growth. No matter what’s next for Cohesity, CodeSignal can provide them with an efficient, trustworthy, and scalable solution to their talent acquisition needs.
How Can CodeSignal Help Your Company?
CodeSignal’s combination of automated, user-friendly scoring and advanced anti-plagiarism technology made it the right solution for Cohesity’s needs. 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. By removing opportunities for bias and streamlining the recruitment process, our data-driven platform can help you #GoBeyondResumes to find the best candidates for your company and support your growth.
I feel like you know that once a candidate passes a CodeSignal test […] you know that they’re going to be top-tier candidates and they’re going to be able to pass the technical bar really easily
Chanel Perrone
University Recruiter