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customer story

TripActions + CodeSignal

Building University Recruiting From the Ground Up

Industry

Travel

HQ

Palo Alto, CA

COMPANY SIZE

250-1,000

PRODUCTS USED

Pre-Screen, Interview

Taking the Headache Out of Business Travel

In 2015–still fresh off the success of their first joint venture–long-time collaborators Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig were itching to take on a new project. Two years prior, they sold StreamOnce, a business communications company they had built, to Jive Software. The pair decided to get in touch with one of StreamOnce’s investors to pitch their latest idea–a business expense record management solution. Intrigued but not yet sold, their investor advised them to broaden their vision and then call him again. Back at the drawing board, Ariel and Ilan started thinking bigger–that’s when they came up with TripActions.

Though they didn’t have direct experience in the travel industry, Ariel and Ilan had a lot of experience when it came to traveling for business–and just how much of a headache it could be. TripActions doesn’t just help companies manage their travel expense records; they provide full, end-to-end business travel solutions. TripActions utilizes machine learning to help clients find and book the best flights and hotels for their trips by showing users listings that match both the company’s policies and the traveler’s personal preferences. They also provide hands-on, personalized support throughout the user’s trip; premier services for executives; and a suite of expense management tools to truly streamline and optimize the entire business travel experience.

TripActions founders Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig

University Recruiting, From the Ground Up

Between its founding in 2015 and 2019, TripActions exploded; with 5x year-over-year growth between 2018 and 2019, a portfolio of over 2,000 clients, and plans to launch new products and possibly go public, TripActions needed to scale its teams quickly to keep up. University recruiting presents rapidly-growing companies like TripActions with access to a wide pool of immediately available talent, making it an integral part of scaling operations. 

However, managing such a high volume of candidates is no easy task: “Anyone who works in university knows that you’ll get thousands of applicants a month, and there’s no real way to sort out who’s that top talent from an unbiased approach,” says Sophia Yamauchi, a university recruiter with TripActions. Sophia joined TripActions in May 2019 to help build and launch their university recruiting program.

Anyone who works in university knows that you’ll get thousands of applicants a month, and there’s no real way to sort out who’s that top talent from an unbiased approach.

— Sophia Yamauchi, university recruiter

University recruiting presents a unique set of challenges, especially when it comes to scaling. Unlike general talent acquisition–which is typically a slower process, with positions opening up less frequently and a smaller and smaller pool of applicants to choose from as roles demand more experience or specialization–university recruiting is highly seasonal and has talent acquisition professionals managing rapid influxes of candidates over short periods; they need to move quickly through a high volume of applicants to stay competitive. Moreover, staffing constraints often mean university recruiting teams need to focus their time and energy on just a few target schools, limiting their reach and potentially missing out on highly skilled new graduates. 

When building out TripActions’ university recruiting program, Sophia knew that she needed solutions that could help them manage the high volume of candidates during peak season, widen their pipeline to look beyond prestige and target schools, and move quickly to ensure they stay competitive for top talent. Applicant tracking systems helped, as did coding assessments, but they came with their own sets of issues as well. Coding assessments still had to be written, scored, and interpreted by the engineering team, slowing down the hiring process and making assessments unviable as a top-of-funnel screening tool. Resumes, however, didn’t always provide a reliable or objective overview of a candidate’s skills. With these challenges in mind, Sophia set out to find a better solution to help TripActions develop and scale out an efficient and effective university recruiting program.

Solutions that Support You

Sophia turned to CodeSignal Pre-Screen to help scale and manage TripActions’ new university recruiting program. Pre-Screen is a first-of-its-kind technical skills evaluation solution that’s especially effective for fast-paced, high-volume talent acquisition operations like Sophia needed to create. Pre-Screen utilizes over half a decade of machine learning to power skills evaluation frameworks aligned to key roles, such as early career talent. Candidates answer coding questions at home, on their schedule. Once completed, CodeSignal automatically generates the candidate’s Coding ScoreTM–a credit score-like evaluation developed by CodeSignal that provides talent acquisition professionals with an objective, easy-to-understand snapshot of a candidate’s abilities. The Coding ScoreTM is even broken down by various skillsets, such as speed, cleanliness, problem-solving, and more.

CodeSignal Pre-Screen also supports seamless integration with Greenhouse ATS, simplifying TripActions’ recruitment process by allowing them to consolidate all of their candidate information in one place. A candidate’s Coding ScoreTM is automatically fed into Greenhouse, helping Sophia’s team stay organized while managing their high-volume pipelines. “I absolutely love how CodeSignal integrates with Greenhouse–being able to see the scores automatically imported, being able to send out batches of assessments, is really helpful for our team,” Sophia says. This integration helps TripActions move quickly through the recruiting process, ensuring that they can identify and nab top candidates before anyone else.

Sophia also notes how the CodeSignal support team helped them as calibrated and rolled out Pre-Screen as part of their talent acquisition process. “I think that one of the things that was most important to us when we were first bringing on CodeSignal was, will they be able to adapt and, almost, keep up with the pace?” Sophia asks, going on to say, “it was so amazing to be able to have the CodeSignal team just there on hand–any time we had a question, the team was always there to answer us so promptly, and we are so grateful for everyone who was just there, helping us get onboarded really quickly.” User experience is essential to CodeSignal, and that commitment to experience goes beyond interface and design–fast, friendly, and effective user support ensures that you can focus on your candidates.

Business Travel in a Post-COVID World

As travel slowly recovers and companies look ahead to plan for a post-COVID world, TripActions has seen an increase in sales–Ariel noted that they even signed their biggest client to date after lockdown measures began going into effect. While plans for going public may be on pause, TripActions is continuing to find ways to grow; they’ve recently begun work on product improvements that may facilitate vacation and leisure bookings for existing users. As the travel industry recovers, TripActions is poised to continue leading and innovating.   

How Can CodeSignal Help Your Company?

When Sophia needed to build a university recruiting program for TripActions, CodeSignal Pre-Screen was the right choice for her. CodeSignal also offers Tech Screen and Interview as part of our suite of technical interview and assessment solutions. Tech Screen is a technical phone screen replacement that gives time back to engineers while providing a white glove candidate experience, while Interview is a powerful, all-in-one remote technical interviewing solution that includes HD audio and video calling, a fully-integrated live coding environment, a virtual whiteboard, and more. No matter what recruiting challenge your company is facing, CodeSignal is ready to help you #GoBeyondResumes with our flexible, scalable solutions.  

I absolutely love how CodeSignal integrates with Greenhouse–being able to see the scores automatically imported, being able to send out batches of tests, is really helpful for our team.
Sophia Yamauchi
University Recruiter