CoderPad Empowers CarGurus to Hire 7x More Engineers

A global online automotive platform, CarGurus offers digital retail solutions and an online wholesale platform. The CarGurus marketplace lets consumers buy or sell a car online or in-person and lets dealerships effectively price, market, acquire, and sell vehicles across the country. Using proprietary technology, search algorithms, and data analytics to bring trust, transparency, and competitive pricing to the automotive shopping experience, CarGurus is the nation’s most visited automotive shopping site.

Company Growth Drove Need for Top Talent

CarGurus was experiencing a period of growth. The company had products ready to be built — and needed highly talented developers to bring those plans and ideas to fruition. But CarGurus’ engineering interview process was filled with challenges like:

• Phone-based communication: CarGurus’ technical interview process took place exclusively over the phone, making it difficult for interviewers to get any real sense of how a candidate might attack a problem.
  
• Lackluster in-person interviews: As the interview process progressed, candidates who traveled to take part in on-site interviews had to rely on a whiteboard to showcase their coding skills.
  
• Scheduling hassles: Scheduling and securing interview rooms for interviewers to call candidates created a significant roadblock in the interview and hiring process.
  
• Narrow technical vetting: Interviewers had difficulty vetting candidates for skills outside of the company’s core tech stack.

CarGurus’ hiring team knew that the way they were conducting technical interviews wasn’t standardized or scalable – so they set out to find a solution that would improve the effectiveness of their hiring process while simultaneously improving the experience for candidates. 

At the recommendation of one of their board members, CarGurus took a closer look at CoderPad and, after investigating other solutions, ultimately decided to use CoderPad for their technical interview process.

A Scalable, Standardized Process

Ultimately, CoderPad has helped CarGurus streamline and standardize their interview and hiring processes. Now, interviewers can run technical interviews from their desks rather than booking conference rooms, speeding up the process exponentially. The company can now provide a much better candidate experience while ensuring that interviewers can assess a candidate’s most important technical skills. Specifically, CoderPad has allowed CarGurus’ team to build out a Question Bank that engineers can collaboratively leverage during the hiring process, increasing the effectiveness of interviews and allowing the company to standardize on success criteria. 

In addition, CoderPad has played a critical role in helping the CarGurus hiring team scale its interview process in a remote work environment. The team can complete more interviews in less time, moving quality candidates through the pipeline more quickly. The CarGurus hiring team especially appreciates the flexible, realistic coding environment that CoderPad provides, as it allows them to evaluate talent (and their problem-solving skills) across a number of languages and frameworks. 

After CoderPad: 250 More Interviews, 7x the Number of New Engineers

Before using CoderPad, a CarGurus interviewer would need 15 minutes to find their question and get situated to conduct a technical phone screen; since working with CoderPad, this prep time has been reduced to zero — meaning that interviewers can interview more candidates. 

In 2021, CarGurus is on pace to conduct 250+ more technical interviews than they completed prior to adopting CoderPad. Thanks to CarGurus’ increased interview capacity, the team anticipates making 8x more offers to engineering candidates than they did just two years prior and adding 7x the number of new engineers — helping the company meet its product development goals and continue serving its diverse audiences.