Why we started Adaface

TLDR; We believe that status quo tech assessment platforms are not a fair way for companies to evaluate engineers. We started Adaface to help companies find great engineers by assessing on-the-job skills required for a role.

If you're here you're probably wondering why we created yet another tool to automate screening interviews or coding tests. To fully understand why, we have to look at the current status quo for interviewing engineers, specifically the screening phase.

As more and more candidates started applying for tech roles, companies started looking for ways to automate the initial rounds of screening.

Traditional assessments use the equivalent of puzzles/ obscure computer science questions or niche algorithms that you never really use in practice. 🤯

While it's great if someone's good at puzzles (even though this skill can be improved with practice), this is not a strong indicator of how good of an engineer someone is/ how good they're going to be in the role. Also, this way of measuring developer skills' has an inherent bias against more experienced developers.

As an interviewer it is very easy to forget how stressful the interview setting is for the interviewee. Having to write executable code for a very niche algorithm you studied at school (that too only if you were a CS major), and never really used in your time as an engineer in the real world, with the timer ticking, can be very very intimidating! 😨

A lot of developers who've previously faced these ridiculous tests suggest that companies talk to them instead of sending over a test. While this would be a no brainer to do in an ideal scenario, this is not possible to do when you have 120 candidates applying for 1 role. For very senior engineering positions (8+ years of experience) however, it absolutely makes sense to interview every candidate who appears to be qualified for the role and it is quite doable as well since there are significantly fewer candidates.

Software engineers tend to not be good at selling themselves, and great candidates often massively undersell themselves on paper. At best, a resume screen helps you eliminate some candidates who are very clearly not qualified for the role and sort resumes by priority. Beyond that, using a resume filter has an inherent bias towards candidates with good credentials (education and work history). Good programmers can come from anywhere, and using keyword matching means you're probably missing out on a lot of great candidates. But if companies start interviewing everyone who applies, it would take up all of the engineering team's time just to interview candidates.

So, after that really long rant, what is it that we're trying to do?

We're building a way for companies and candidates to find out if they're a good fit. For companies to figure out who the best suited candidates for their role, while still being humane with the interview process. And for candidates to figure out if they'd be a good fit. If ability/ experience expectations are mismatched, an in-person interview can be a difficult (traumatic even!) experience at worst, and a time sink at best for the candidate.

For each role in a company, our subject matter experts design a custom assessment based on the requirements of the role.

Yes, ideally you want to assess their ability to write clean, maintainable code with a simple design, work collaboratively with the team to arrive at solutions to difficult problems etc. But before setting up a 2 hour interview with each of 120 candidates you also want to know if the candidate can write code. Anyone who has never been on the interviewer's side of the table will be surprised by how many candidates cannot write code. Screening interviews are here to stay. We're trying to make them better.

At Adaface, we set up 45 min candidate-friendly assessments that test for on-the-job skills. 🤩

Here's what we're doing differently from the status quo:

• Shorter assessments (45-60 mins) to make sure engineers can do it ASAP, they are investing as less time as possible, while still enough to showcase their expertise.
• Custom assessments tailored to the requirements of the role (NO trick questions)
• Questions at the simpler end of the spectrum (it is a screening interview) with a very generous time allowance (3x what it takes our team to write code for it)
• Extremely granular scoring that eliminates false positives and false negatives
• Friendly candidate experience (hints for each question, friendly messaging and chatbot; average candidate NPS is 4.4/5) ☺️

Hopefully, you've gotten a good sense of why we started Adaface and we've convinced you it is a good idea. 🙂

So far, candidates seem to really like the conversational approach to assessments, check out our wall of love here.

Challenging the status quo is never easy, and we're looking for help from early adopters like yourself. We'd absolutely love for you to check out the product/ reach out! 🤩