Case Study
CoderPad Supports a Post-IPO Hiring Surge at Yext
Yext is a search technology company whose mission is to help businesses and organizations around the world deliver official answers to people’s questions online – no matter where they’re searching. Since their founding in 2006, Yext has worked with some of the biggest names in technology – from Google to Facebook to Uber – in service of this mission.
Yext is trying to solve a number of huge challenges in the field of search, whether it’s developing algorithms to truly understand the questions people ask online or transforming unstructured data into structured facts — and that means that they need to recruit high-caliber engineering candidates who can solve complex technical challenges.
No other platform that we evaluated came close to CoderPad in providing the overall experience we wanted for both our candidates and interviewers.
5 stars
Recruiting high-caliber candidates requires standardizing on a robust technical interview platform. The company’s initial attempt was a browser-based collaborative text editor. The interviewer would paste in a problem description and begin brainstorming with the candidate. Although this was a good start, the solution took a long time to set up, which ate into the time spent collaborating with promising recruits.
Both recruiters and developers found this process inefficient. Not only was it a repetitive, time-consuming process, but the tool also lacked advanced coding features that would allow candidates to communicate ideas through code or verify solution accuracy.
CoderPad Streamlines the Technical Interviewing Process
Following its 2017 IPO, Yext experienced a hiring surge that prompted an evaluation of its existing interviewing and recruiting processes across the board. On the engineering side, the company needed a way to improve the efficiency of interviews and hire top-tier candidates at speed, while adding much-needed features such as text highlighting, autocorrect, built-in videoconferencing, and information security. Enter CoderPad, the solution Yext ultimately chose to streamline its technical interviewing process.
Recruiters at Yext especially loved CoderPad’s syntax highlighting, and they appreciated having a runtime environment that could support all the languages used in their question bank. They were able to manage their own set of coding problems alongside prepared suites of test cases and immediately share those with candidates to begin the interview. The rich programming environment allowed candidates to focus on showcasing their talent, and let recruiters effectively, uniformly, and objectively assess candidates. This helped eliminate any inherent bias from the recruiting process.
I find that CoderPad makes solving problems a pleasure, so much so that I even find myself occasionally going into the platform to solve our own interview challenges and create new ones.
5 stars
Lastly, CoderPad has made technical interviews at Yext more enjoyable for both interviewers and candidates. The platform lets interviewers pull questions in right away, with minimum effort, to code collaboratively with their candidates rather than having to copy/paste or spend time explaining how the platform works. At the same time, the interviewee gets a set of tools that they instinctively know how to use and that mirrors real-life developer scenarios.
With CoderPad, candidates find no obstacle to creativity within the interviewing space. The rich syntax highlighting and smooth runtime environment specifically have given candidates the ability to test their approaches and iterate over their solutions rapidly, keeping conversations focused around content and skills rather than mechanics.
Creating a Compelling Interview Experience with CoderPad
CoderPad has enabled Yext to increase the speed of its hiring process and improve the quality of engineers that it hires. Optimizing the interview process has reduced the strain on the interviewers, who are now able to conduct more meaningful interviews more efficiently.
CoderPad has also made it easier for interviewers to simulate the problems and challenges that an engineer would tackle during a typical day at Yext, so that the company can identify the best fit candidates and build a more engaged workforce.
More than 1,500 CoderPad interviews later, Yext continues to reap the benefits of the platform. Recently, they’ve leveraged CoderPad’s API integrations to tie their question bank to their code repository, meaning that engineers can use examples from their daily workflows to make the interviewing experience even more varied, true-to-life, and compelling.