Case Study
How McAfee Cut Time to Hire by Over 20%
McAfee is one of the world’s leading cybersecurity brands—protecting millions of users daily and driving innovation at a global scale. This work demands exceptional technical talent—and the confidence to choose the very best.
For Rodney Walden, Head of Global Talent Acquisition at McAfee, hiring the best candidates is not just part of the job—it’s his specialty. With deep experience in building agile, scalable hiring systems at enterprise tech organizations, Rodney was eager to bring operational rigor to McAfee’s talent engine and drive impressive results.
When Rodney was introduced to CoderPad by a peer from Apple (already leveraging the platform), he saw a powerful opportunity: a tool that could solve McAfee’s technical hiring challenges and deliver unprecedented impact for the business. From that moment, Rodney became the driving force behind the change.
The Challenge: Long Timelines, No Standards, and New Threats
Before CoderPad, McAfee’s technical hiring process was slow — recruiter screens followed by multiple technical interviews – each dependent on feedback from the last, feedback that took a long time to manually collect.
But speed wasn’t the only problem:
- No consistency or standardization — Every role and hiring manager used different approaches, making it difficult to compare candidates fairly or ensure quality across the board.
- AI misuse and cheating risks — With ChatGPT and similar tools emerging rapidly, candidates could leverage external help during interviews and assessments, and McAfee had no reliable way to detect it.
- Bottlenecks in decision-making — Averaging 80–85 days from posting to acceptance, with sometimes only one finalist in many processes, McAfee often faced a “hire now or start over” dilemma.
By implementing CoderPad, we are able to assess at scale – we can greet the talent that applies and get them engaged in the process straight away. We validate their baseline capabilities quickly with CoderPad Screen and then are able to get them expedited through to live CoderPad interviews to help validate those skills even further and make faster decisions. This is the heart of the ROI.
5 stars
The Turning Point: Choosing CoderPad for Its Flexibility
When evaluating hiring platforms, flexibility quickly became the make-or-break factor for McAfee. Their technical hiring needs were unusually diverse — spanning product engineers building core products, cybersecurity specialists with deep domain expertise, and internal technical roles supporting the broader organization.
Most platforms struggled to support all three, offering generic, “canned” assessments that didn’t reflect McAfee’s real-world requirements. CoderPad stood out by collaborating directly with McAfee’s team to customize both asynchronous assessments and live interview formats to each role type.
Rather than forcing McAfee to fit into a prebuilt test, CoderPad enabled them to:
- Build role-specific question sets tailored to exact job requirements
- Adjust difficulty levels and content focus based on hiring manager feedback
- Incorporate realistic, McAfee-specific scenarios to evaluate problem-solving
- Support multiple coding languages and frameworks to mirror production tools
The process looked like this:
0. Start small to move fast
We began with a small McAfee technical team to iterate quickly, ensuring the partnership could produce meaningful content in weeks, not months.
1. Technical-to-technical ideation
Our technical experts sat down with McAfee’s technical leaders in working sessions to understand the exact skills they wanted to surface — from foundational coding ability to cybersecurity expertise to collaboration and problem-solving.
2. Initial round of custom questions
From those sessions, we created an initial question set spanning both soft skills and technical skills unique to McAfee’s environment, including asynchronous screens and live interview projects.
3. Second round of collaboration
We reviewed those questions together with McAfee in a second ideation session, aligning tightly on scope, difficulty, and hiring goals. This “messy middle” collaboration was key: it ensured McAfee got the benefit of our guidance, while retaining ownership and input into the process.
4. AI-assisted scaling
We used AI to scale up content creation, ensuring breadth and depth across technical areas. This reinforced a broader CoderPad advantage: AI is infused across our platform — this includes for content creation. The result: unlimited, specific questions!
5. Validation and enablement
We validated the content together and trained McAfee’s team on how to customize and fine-tune questions themselves. Once they saw how easy it was, their leaders leaned in, refining and expanding the bank to make asynchronous assessments and live interview questions even stronger.
This process produced:
- A curated library of custom content — ~100 multiple-choice screening questions and 13+ custom interview questions — an incredible and robust starting point.
- Higher-signal assessments and stronger selectivity.
- A better candidate experience. Candidates engaged with realistic, job-relevant scenarios rather than irrelevant or generic puzzles, building confidence in McAfee’s hiring process from the first step.
Flexibility and collaboration together became the game-changer. McAfee didn’t just adopt a tool; they co-built a system with CoderPad that could flex and evolve with their needs — whether that meant adding new AI-related skills, adapting to emerging security trends, or adjusting difficulty to meet the market.
The biggest advantage of CoderPad for McAfee was really the amount of flexibility that the engineering and the product team offered us. There was a total willingness to flex to our unique environment and needs.
5 stars
Immediate Impact: Better Hires, Faster Decisions
With CoderPad, McAfee can validate skills earlier and run parallel interviews instead of sequential ones.
The results:
- Time to hire cut by ~22% — from 80–85 days to 66 days globally
- Assessment completion rates up from 50% to 85%
- Finalist pools expanded from 1 candidate to 4–6 highly qualified contenders
- Hours required to screen candidates by the engineering team dramatically declined
This larger, stronger finalist pool made McAfee far more selective — able to compare top contenders head-to-head and hire only those who truly met the bar. With CoderPad, McAfee is getting BETTER hires locked in meaningfully FASTER.
Leadership here recognizes that with CoderPad, we are getting higher quality candidates in the door to evaluate. And as a result, are able to extend offers to better talent and make better hires. They see the benefit. And it’s certainly made the relationship between Talent Acquisition and Engineering stronger.
5 stars
Ongoing Adaptability: Continuous Iteration with Live Dashboards
That same flexibility is now central to how McAfee manages technical hiring. CoderPad’s real-time analytics and benchmarking tools allow the team to monitor candidate performance, track completion times, and identify friction points at a glance.
Assessment content is continually updated based on this data. Before every hiring cycle, McAfee reviews and refines test content to ensure it reflects the latest technical requirements and market conditions. If a role’s needs shift, the process can be quickly adapted — whether that means rewriting questions, adjusting time limits, or altering the difficulty curve. CoderPad makes this fast and easy.
This “monitor → refine → test → repeat” cycle ensures McAfee’s assessments remain relevant, fair, and competitive, while preserving the ability to be more selective in choosing the best talent.
If you don’t use a tool like CoderPad in today’s day and age, you won’t be successful. The market is changing too fast. You just can’t afford to have static tests or canned interviews anymore.
5 stars
CoderPad’s ROI is Obvious
McAfee didn’t just speed up hiring with CoderPad — they built a metrics-driven, outcome-focused process that is faster, smarter, more adaptable, and significantly more selective.
By partnering deeply with Rodney’s team — not just delivering content, but co-creating it — CoderPad helped McAfee measure, improve, and repeat success at scale.
Rodney’s structured approach, combined with CoderPad’s flexibility and partnership, made outcomes clear:
- ~22% faster time-to-accept (80–85 days → 66 days globally)
- +35% increase in assessment completion rates
- 4–6x more finalists in the interview stage
- Lower cost-per-hire and faster onboarding
- Reusable candidate pipeline for future roles
- Higher selectivity = stronger hires
We now have new hires starting essentially a month or a month and a half sooner. For sure, the tool is paying for itself in that way alone. We are all very happy with CoderPad’s business impact over here at McAfee.
5 stars