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
Greenhouse + CodeSignal
Mission-Focused, Data-Driven Recruiting
Industry
Enterprise Software
HQ
New York City, NY
COMPANY SIZE
250-1,000
PRODUCTS USED
Interview
Great Companies Start with Great Hiring
Daniel Chait wasn’t always in the recruiting industry; in fact, he spent fifteen years making a name for himself in financial technology. Following successful stints at various companies, he founded consulting firm Lab49 in 2002. Lab49 would go on to provide strategy, design, and technology solutions for some of the world’s biggest banks, and Daniel would go on to manage human capital for the growing company.
It was there that he came to realize that recruiting was in desperate need of solutions. Hiring is a strategic priority, especially for young, fast-growing businesses–and yet, Daniel found that recruiting was often a disorganized, inefficient process. When talent is such a crucial component of whether a young company sinks or swims, recruiting shouldn’t be left up to chance, best guesses, or gut feelings; it should be an efficient, standardized, evidence-based process that companies can track, analyze, and optimize.
That realization is why Daniel founded Greenhouse in 2012. Greenhouse is more than an applicant tracking system–it’s a suite of recruiting solutions that guide companies toward better, data-driven hiring decisions. With more than 4,000 customers and a 45% increase in year-over-year revenue between 2019 and 2020, Greenhouse is growing fast and well on its way to realizing its mission of making every company great at hiring.
Greenhouse founder Daniel Chait
A Need for Realignment
Greenhouse’s growth between 2019 and 2020 allowed them to expand their operations, opening new offices in Denver, Colorado and Dublin, Ireland. Naturally, this expansion led to a need to grow their teams. Katie DiCioccio joined Greenhouse years earlier, in 2015, as a recruiting coordinator; by the time Greenhouse was looking to both staff these new offices and grow their teams at their existing locations, she had moved up to become their manager of technical recruiting.
Katie worked alongside Director of Engineering Tim Johnson to find the technical talent Greenhouse needed to facilitate their growth. It was during this time that they both realized that Greenhouse’s technical hiring process wasn’t as efficient as it could be. “Our pass-through rates were very high, which meant that a lot of people came onsite when it wasn’t necessary for them to do so,” says Tim. Onsite interviews for technical positions typically run anywhere from 4 to 8 hours, meaning that bringing in the wrong candidates is a costly misstep that takes valuable development time away from engineering teams.
Greenhouse already had methods in place to filter candidates, but their results were inconsistent. “Before, we used to have two different question-and-answer phone screens, and it wasn’t always clear what the value we were getting out of them,” says Tim. With no way to screen candidates efficiently and consistently, they found that Greenhouse’s conversion rates were suffering–too many candidates were making it through their screening processes, resulting in a slower, more expensive hiring process. To both Katie and Tim, it was apparent that Greenhouse needed to bring it talent acquisition practices back in line with their vision of what hiring should be.
Screening Selectively, Saving Time
Katie turned to CodeSignal for help reworking Greenhouse’s recruiting process. Greenhouse uses CodeSignal Interview–an all-in-one remote interviewing and assessment tool–to gain deeper insight into their candidates’ experiences with the questions they’re asked to solve, helping them make more informed screening decisions. Being able to work through a question with a candidate in real time gives their engineering team “an ability to assess a person’s style,” says Tim. “It lets us understand how they work.” They can assess how the candidate thinks through a problem, what areas they struggle with, and where they need to grow–information that simply isn’t available to them with asynchronous assessments. This helps Tim’s engineering team evaluate candidates not only on skill, but on potential; by identifying strengths and weaknesses more precisely and giving live feedback, they’re able to better identify the candidates who are best prepared to learn and grow at Greenhouse.
The live experience gives us an ability to assess a person’s style. It lets us understand how they work. How do they approach a problem? How do they pick apart the requirements?
Tim Johnson, Director of Engineering
Conducting live coding assessments also helped Tim and Katie better align Greenhouse’s hiring process with their growth-oriented company culture. Tim notes that, with Interview’s live, collaborative coding environment, “we can go in there and help them if they’re getting stuck in certain pieces. We can write example code, we can paste in links, and it really lets the candidate understand that we’re here to help them get through the exercise.” Coupling high standards and high levels of support is at the core of Greenhouse’s culture. Being able to move through the coding questions alongside candidates, offering help and feedback whenever it’s needed, allows Tim and his team to truly integrate these values into their hiring process. This doesn’t go unnoticed, either: Katie notes that candidates “have nothing but great things to say about their experience getting on CodeSignal.”
CodeSignal hasn’t just improved the candidate experience at Greenhouse, either. Tim says that “CodeSignal has been received very well by the product engineering team.” He notes “the interactivity, the reliability, the stability, [and] the language support” as key features his team appreciates. Katie adds that, since switching to CodeSignal, they’ve seen “a better pass-through rate and […] better invest in time during our onsite process,” meaning that not only are Greenhouse’s engineers having a better experience when it comes to conducting interviews, but they’re also interviewing more efficiently. Better pass-through rates mean engineering time is only spent on the most highly-qualified talent, allowing Greenhouse to hire more people in less time while providing everyone involved with a better experience.
Mission-Focused, Every Step of the Way
Greenhouse was already keenly aware of the value of making data-driven recruiting decisions and creating positive candidate and interviewer experiences; with the help of CodeSignal Interview, they were able to more fully integrate these values into their technical hiring process. They improved interviewer experience by providing their engineering team with collaborative, reliable, versatile tools while also bettering experience on the candidate end by improving their screening process, ensuring that only well-qualified candidates are passed through. The end result is a faster, more efficient talent acquisition funnel with less frustration and more satisfaction for both interviewers and interviewees.
The benefits of a more efficient and satisfying hiring process can already be seen at Greenhouse; better pass-through rates mean resources can be focused on improving and developing their products–like the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity Assessment, which debuted in June 2020. This assessment helps companies hone in on specific areas of their hiring process they can improve and provides them with actionable advice. Greenhouse’s commitment to growing, supporting, and empowering permeates everything they do, from products like this all the way down to their own hiring process–and it’s that focus on their mission that’ll ensure they keep growing.
How Can CodeSignal Help Your Company?
CodeSignal Interview was the right choice for Greenhouse. With its integrated, collaborative coding environment; HD audio and video calling; virtual whiteboard; extensive language support; and more, it provided them with the power and flexibility to better screen and support their candidates. CodeSignal also offers Tech Screen-–a technical phone screen replacement that gives time back to engineers while providing a white glove candidate experience, and Pre-Screen— a top-of-the-funnel tool to help companies quickly identify quality candidates from high volume pipelines. With a suite of technical recruiting solutions, CodeSignal is ready to help your company #GoBeyondResumes and tackle whatever hiring challenge it faces.