Customer Story
How Handshake accelerates technical hiring with CodeSignal
Challenge
Handshake, the leading career platform that connects new grad talent with employers, was rapidly building out its operational and engineering teams. For roles that required strong SQL and technical problem-solving skills, the team initially relied on take-home assessments. These were time-consuming to create and manually score, as well as being vulnerable to cheating.
For software engineering roles, Handshake’s manual screening process also produced misleading signals of skill. Pass-through rates were high in early stages, only to drop sharply in later interviews—meaning that interviewers were spending lots of time interviewing underqualified candidates. With time-to-fill stretching to more than two months, the team needed a faster, more reliable way to assess real skills early and ensure candidates advancing in the process were truly qualified.
Solution
Handshake adopted CodeSignal’s assessments, integrated directly with its ATS (Ashby). This eliminates the need for custom take-home exercises by replacing them with a solution that provides automated test delivery, consistent scoring, and integrity safeguards.
For operational roles that require proficiency in SQL, CodeSignal assessments provide a realistic, cheat-resistant way to evaluate candidates’ role-relevant skills. Similarly, CodeSignal’s software engineering assessments give hiring teams a stronger early signal of skill, allowing them to better align top-of-funnel performance with onsite success for SWE roles.
With an automated process for sending and scoring assessments, recruiters now focus on candidate experience and decision-making rather than administrative setup. Candidates, meanwhile, benefit from a faster and more standardized evaluation process.
Results
With CodeSignal, Handshake improved both hiring quality and speed, aligning early assessment outcomes with later-stage performance and significantly reducing time to hire.
So far, Handshake has seen the following results:
50% reduction in average time-to-fill, from 65 to 32 days
Increased onsite pass-through rates as early-stage signal became more predictive
100s of recruiting and engineering hours saved by automating top-of-funnel screening
Customer overview
Products used
Technical Assessments
Company size
500-1,000
Customer since
2025
