Case Study
How Doctolib Streamlined Its Hiring Process to Save Hours per Hire and Keep 25% More Candidates in the Funnel
How did France’s highest-valued startup drive efficiency in the hiring process to hire engineers at massive scale?
Doctolib is now officially France’s highest-valued startup after recently raising €500 million to reach a €5.8 billion valuation. A tech health platform, Doctolib provides various services, such as online appointment booking and telehealth services. Over 300,000 healthcare workers and 60 million patients use Doctolib. The company currently employs 2,300 people and there are plans to hire another 3,500 in the next 5 years. Roughly a quarter of these positions will be in the tech field.
Scaling at a fast pace is challenging and requires an optimized, standardized hiring process to drive efficacy and accuracy. In order to recruit developers more efficiently and ensure an incredible candidate experience that would minimize dropoff, Doctolib turned to CoderPad for its technical hiring needs.
Doctolib + CoderPad
The impact CoderPad has had on Doctolib’s technical hiring process is undeniable.
Since using CoderPad, Doctolib has been able to:
- Dramatically improve the candidate experience: The percentage of candidates who remain in the hiring funnel has increased by 25%
- Save the engineering team countless hours: Hours are saved per technical hire, allowing the engineering team more time to work on shipping product to drive business outcomes
| BEFORE CODERPAD | WITH CODERPAD |
| Candidates were screened based on resumes | Candidates are screened based on skills |
| Candidates spent 4-6 hours to complete a lengthy take home assignment | Candidates spend no more than 60 minutes on a technical screen that measures the skills that truly matter |
| Engineers had to spend hours manually grading candidates’ take home assignments | Technical screens are automatically graded for easy filtering by recruiting teams (even those without technical knowledge) |
| Grading of take home assignments was subjective | Grading of screens is objective and fair |
| Candidates had to wait days after submitting assignments to find out if they’d passed | Candidates are contacted quickly as it’s easy for non-technical recruiting teams to determine who should progress to the next step |
| Candidates, recruiters, and engineering hiring managers wasted time managing technical difficulties during live interviews | CoderPad Interview’s reliable platform provides a collaborative coding experience that is seamless with no technical hiccups |
| 52% of candidates would withdraw from the process | 77% of candidates continue through the process |
Doctolib’s process prior to adopting CoderPad
Prior to using CoderPad, Doctolib’s technical hiring process was lengthy and required hours of the engineering team’s time. This was problematic for both internal hiring teams who had to deprioritize shipping products to do hiring related activities and candidates who would grow frustrated with the timeline and withdraw from the process.
- The talent acquisition team selected candidates based on CVs.
- Candidates did a take-home assignment based on a real problem a developer could work on at Doctolib. This task typically took 4-6 hours to complete.
- Engineers were recruited to grade the assignment. This could take hours to do.
- Candidates participated in 3 tech interviews over a span of 2 hours.
While the process was mostly appreciated by candidates, the process was a little long in several areas and contained a few sticking points.
The lengthy take-home test turned off some senior developers
The take home assignment took hours to complete. For senior developers with a lot of job offers and limited time, this meant that only about half of the applicants completed the assignment.
While Doctolib wanted to provide a relevant test, it was important to reassess the amount of time they were asking candidates to spend.
The take home was not simple to grade
In an ideal situation, the take-home assignment would only take 30 minutes to grade.
The engineer tasked with grading it could run a test on the code and everything would execute as expected. Unfortunately, this was not always the case. Sometimes when the test wouldn’t run, engineers would have to investigate what the issue was and make some modifications to be able to run the test.
Did the candidate import a library? Would they have to remove that so it would be compatible with their testing suite?
An engineer who has volunteered to grade the test, might have allocated 30 minutes in their busy schedule but end up needing several hours. Due to the varying amount of time that the test took to grade, the pool of engineers willing to grade the test dwindled over time.
Talent acquisition would also need to wait a day or two to get test results back from busy engineers to be able to respond to candidates.
The take home grading was not objective
When it wasn’t simple to figure out why the test wouldn’t run and an engineer didn’t have time to explore further, a decision would have to be made whether to move forward or not.
This was not a clear-cut decision to make so it required subjective judgment. Each situation would be different so it was not possible to have a clear guideline.
This means one case might be treated differently depending on who was doing the grading, an unfortunate outcome when trying to make the process as fair and unbiased as possible.
Running 3 tech interviews was time-consuming and far from seamless
3 tech interviews in 2-hour blocks are feasible when there aren’t a lot of interviews. In a company that is scaling for massive growth, it’s just too long. As engineers left the recruiting pool due to time constraints and not enough new ones joined to meet increasing demand, interviews became more frequent for those who remained. After a while, it became very overwhelming for the engineers doing interviews.
Time would also sometimes be wasted with setup. Candidates would often forget to set up their computers in advance and might join the interview on a computer without their regular IDE. Lacking the tools they needed, they sometimes ended up doing a test in a language that wasn’t their strongest. This meant that hiring managers weren’t always seeing a candidate’s best possible work.
In other cases, people weren’t familiar with Google Meet and would struggle to share their screen, sometimes needing to reconnect to give the necessary permissions. It ate up minutes in the meeting and was stressful for candidates. This led to a poor experience for both the interviewer and the candidate.
Doctolib’s process with CoderPad
A custom 30-60 minute CoderPad Screen replaced the 4-6 hour take-home assignment
Now, the engineering team uses CoderPad Screen to filter candidates based on skills. The test takes less than a quarter the time of the previous assignment. It’s much easier for candidates to squeeze into a busy schedule.
Automatic grading is saving the engineering team countless hours
With CoderPad Screen, engineers don’t have to spend hours grading lengthy take home assignments. Now, the talent acquisition team is empowered to handle the filtering stage. While they are mostly not from a technical background, CoderPad Screen allows them to quickly see which candidates reach the score required to advance to the interview stage and which do not (see sample reports).
This has not only freed up time for the engineers, but also for the TA teams as they don’t have to wait on the engineers to manually grade tests. Now, they can move candidates through the process faster. This also benefits candidates who receive a faster decision on whether they are moving forward or not.
The live interview is now seamless
Live interviews no longer start late as candidates try to set up their IDE or struggle to share their screen on Google Meet. Now that Doctolib uses CoderPad Interview, technical difficulties are a thing of the past. Interviewers and interviewees collaboratively code together in real time solving realistic problems that the developer may encounter on the job. Without the technical difficulties, the experience is smoother for everyone and stress-free. Given how powerful CoderPad’s Interview product is at assessing developers’ hard and soft skills, Doctolib has cut the number of live interviews from three to one.
It’s perfect for doing interviews. It’s just easier.
5 stars
A Dynamic Duo
Leveraging CoderPad, Doctolib has been able to:
- Streamline and optimize the technical hiring process for scale
- Standardize the technical hiring process so that it is fair and free of bias
- Save internal engineering teams countless hours of time per hire
- Improve the candidate experience to attract the best talent
- Increase the number of candidates that remain in the funnel
- And so much more!
Reach out to learn how CoderPad can transform your technical hiring process today.