Netskope Uses CoderPad to Increase Team Efficiency and Improve Experience

A market-leading enterprise cloud security platform, Netskope serves customers across the globe. It is the only security vendor that accelerates your digital transformation journey with a proven security platform that is data-centric, cloud-smart, and as fast as your business. Their breadth of capabilities and the depth of what they can deliver through a single platform have earned them a “leader” designation in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Broker and “visionary” for Secure Web Gateway. 

Netskope’s Rapid Growth Means an Urgent Need for Amazing Developers  

Rizwan MK, Senior Director of Engineering at Netskope, knows his job is a big one. He and his team must continually build and innovate on their platform against a complicated backdrop of emerging competitors and ever-shifting security threats. As the team works to support the company’s rapid growth and accelerate innovation, hiring great developers is at the top of his priority list. But they continue to run into the same problem: the talent they’re looking for is the same talent that Google, Amazon, Salesforce and other big-name companies are targeting. 

Rizwan knew that — to stand out from this crowd — the Netskope hiring team must provide a stellar candidate experience to prospective developers.

Prior to using CoderPad, Rizwan and his team were using a different technical interview platform. Though an improvement from whiteboard interviews they conducted pre-pandemic, this other platform presented quite a few pain points. 

• Unreliable and unstable: the application routinely crashed in the middle of interviews — not an ideal impression for sought-after candidates 
• Unintuitive: candidates found the learning curve impossible to surmount 
• Not standard: hiring managers faced a convoluted process – with no option to standardize their interview approach or collect data to make a fast decision

All this added up to a frustrating experience that wasted developer time, failed to impress candidates, and didn’t result in hiring quality candidates at the pace Netskope needed.

Something needed to change.

Enter CoderPad.

CoderPad Improves Candidate Experience, Increases Efficiency, and Reduces Bias

After implementing CoderPad, Rizwan saw dramatic improvements across their developer hiring process. First off, it greatly improved Netskope’s developer experience – for both candidates and interviewers. Reliability issues became a thing of the past – CoderPad offers superior performance and 99.9% uptime, which prevents frustration and reduces friction. Due to its intuitive design and prominence in the market, the learning curve for candidates is reduced dramatically – allowing them to feel comfortable and get the meat of the interview quicker. This improvement in developer experience helped Rizwan and his team become more competitive in the market – bringing more candidates onboard and scaling with their fast-growing business. 

CoderPad also helped Rizwan improve his team’s efficiency, using a single simple, intuitive tool to reduce hassle and streamline their process. With CoderPad, Rizwan and his team have been able to evaluate candidates on more nuanced skill sets, including syntax knowledge, test cases and specific coding abilities. As a result, they’ve gotten better early signals on whether candidates are the right match and could subsequently move them along faster. 

CoderPad has reduced his team’s overall time spent on technical interviews. In the past, his developers had to spend significant amounts of time preparing for each interview. CoderPad’s efficiency and ease of use enabled them to reduce that time by 30min per interview. Also, because of CoderPad’s reliability and intuitive design, they saw that candidates could complete interview questions much faster, which increased overall technical interview productivity and efficacy. And, as Netskope continues to grow and hire more developers, they were able to easily scale up CoderPad interviews from an average of <125/month last year to >250/month this year. 

At Netskope, Rizwan and his team are passionate about reducing unconscious bias and evaluating candidates objectively. CoderPad allows the candidate’s code to speak for itself. This helps remove unconscious bias, puts hiring on a more level playing field, and allows every candidate to shine. 

CoderPad is the Future of Technical Interviewing  

Rizwan relied on CoderPad during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the solution in play, Netskope didn’t skip a beat with developer hiring, which was more important than ever in a disrupted time. Even when Netskope teams do return to the office, they plan to continue using CoderPad. Pre-pandemic, they brought candidates into the office and used the whiteboard for some interview questions and exercises. After the interview, they would take a picture of the whiteboard to discuss and evaluate as a team. The problem was that they often could not decipher the candidate’s handwriting, agree on what they were trying to say or understand if the code would “actually work”. With CoderPad, there is no debate – with the ability to view Playback, read output and see results of test cases, they could easily and quickly come to an objective decision.

Hiring great developers could not be more essential to keeping Netskope the robust company it is today. Netskope is scaling at an incredible clip, which requires only the best talent to keep up with business demands. And it’s all happening at a time when the market for developers has never been more competitive. 
That’s why Rizwan and his team use CoderPad for technical hiring. With CoderPad, they get precisely what they need: the ability to hire the best candidates, faster.