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Interviewing

Get Almost Half A Year of Developer Time Back with One Simple Change to Your Hiring Process

Time is money. And recruiting the right people takes time. But when developers are pulled away from projects to interview and assess candidates, time is also innovation and product velocity. The hiring process is a substantial, and often unmeasured, cost to the business. That’s why leaders need to find a way to optimize the costliest part of the hiring funnel: the “onsite” interview. It’s entirely possible to streamline this process and return 20+ weeks (yes, you read that right – nearly half of a year) of a developer’s time back to the business.

Interviewing

Hire Better, Faster and in a More Human Way with Take-Home Projects

Recruiting top talent takes a combination of creativity and diligence. Technology makes it incredibly easy to reach a wide audience of qualified job-seekers. But, consistently interviewing applicants, especially programmers, gets complicated. Layer in a very competitive developer hiring landscape and you’ve got yourself an uphill journey to fill any open req in a timely way. Fortunately, there is a way to cast a wide net and find the best developer talent – without spending eight hours a day interviewing.

Product Updates

Inside Perspective on CoderPad: A Year in Review (and What a Year It Was)

To borrow liberally from the Grateful Dead: what a long strange trip 2020’s been. Strange though it was, it’s good to take a look back on an unsettling year, personally and professionally, and take stock of how we did. As a CEO, I feel remarkably fortunate to report that CoderPad weathered the tumult of the pandemic year very well. In fact, we grew — a lot. We grew because what we offer — an intuitive way to accurately evaluate technical hires — lent itself well to both hybrid and fully remote work environments. We grew because of the incredible (and ongoing) work our team did and continues to do. We grew because the features we added and refined — from a new take-home projects product to a Focus Time feature that helps candidates showcase their real skills without pressure — helped hiring teams conduct more unbiased interviews in a market that needs it more than ever.

Community

2021 Is Still Going to Be Different. 4 Predictions for the New Work Normal.

Everyone’s looking to 2021 as if the calendar flip from December 31st to January 1 will be the magical cure-all for one of the worst years on record. Frankly, I’m grateful to put 2020 behind us and enter a new year with optimism and hope. However, we’re all old enough to know that things don’t change overnight. There will still be major adjustments to the work and tech recruiting environments over the next year – and beyond.

Interviewing

Best Practices for Onsite Interviewing

CoderPad is a platform for conducting collaborative technical assessments in the browser. Our interface is very similar to a programmer’s everyday tools and allows code to be run as it’s written. This makes for a comfortable candidate experience and allows the candidate to fully demonstrate their technical skills. CoderPad’s #1 use case is live, interactive interviews, where both the candidate and the interviewer join a shared session at the same time. These sessions can happen remotely as part of the screening process, or as a replacement for the whiteboard during an in-person interview. CoderPad provides a more accurate picture of your candidate’s ability to collaborate over working code and solve problems in real time. Asking a candidate to do a random task on an unfamiliar platform, like a whiteboard, adds stress into the process and can trigger interviewer selection bias.

Product Updates

What Ties Our Products Together? A Desire to Make Technical Interviewing Better and More Fair. For Everyone.

CoderPad is a small start-up but we’ve set out to do something mighty: transform technical interviewing so every candidate can truly showcase their skills and every company can make the best possible hires. When we say “every candidate,” we mean it. Every single one. It’s not about surfacing just the Stanford engineering grads or the MIT data scientists, those who are trained to nail interviews. It’s about ensuring that companies can see and embrace amazing talent that comes from all walks of life and all educational backgrounds: from private colleges to coding bootcamps, from state schools to on-the job training. Because this talent helps companies better create an inclusive and representative workforce that as research has exhaustively demonstrated, ultimately builds and delivers more value to customers and the bottom line.

Interviewing

You Can Do Better. 5 Changes to Make Now to Improve the Candidate Experience.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve noticed a curious theme in my conversations with current and potential customers. It’s this: regret. These companies regret making such deep cuts to their respective workforces just a couple of months ago because now they’re in the market once again for talent. Let’s be clear, it’s generally rough out there. Overall, tech as a sector is still grappling with the gut punch that is coronavirus. Tech job postings have declined 36 percent compared to the same time last year in tech hub cities, with a 37 percent drop in jobs for data scientists and a 32 percent drop for software developers. It’s even worse if you look outside metros like San Francisco and Seattle.

Product Updates

We’re Building Features to Reduce Bias in Technical Interviews. Say Hello to Focus Time.

Product inspiration can come from anywhere. Earlier this summer, inspiration struck us from an unlikely source: an article on what was wrong with technical interviewing that blew up in Hacker News. The article was on this amazing research out of NC State by researchers Chris Parnin and Mahnaz Behroozi (check out our subsequent Q&A with them here! ). Our reading of the article and subsequent conversations directly influenced Focus Time, a feature we’re incredibly proud to roll out (in fact, it was Chris’s idea!).

Announcements

As Promised – An Accountability Update

Earlier this summer, as part of marking Juneteenth, I wrote about what our small but mighty company would do to be thoughtful, intentional and active in anti-racism efforts. We committed to sharing our progress, good and bad, on a quarterly basis. Keeping that promise seems especially important now as our nation gets closer to a presidential election, deals with the fallout of a Supreme Court vacancy, tracks the fires raging on the West Coast, continues to wrangle with the pandemic and all the other events that are affecting our lives. But racism won’t be dismantled if people don’t take action – people like you, people like I’m blessed to work with at CoderPad, and people like me.

Hire with confidence.

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