Why tech recruiters are switching to Adaface

Tech hiring is hard- anyone who is involved would know.

The screening signals that recruiters typically use: fluffed-up resumes, Github profiles, StackOverflow activity, educational qualifications and previous employers are noisy.

Here's how we circumvent the typical issues with the traditional techniques used in tech hiring, by transforming the screening process.

Prevent resume fraud/ bad hires at scale

The biggest challenges with screening processes is the lack of scalability. Checking open-source projects of candidates, eyeballing resumes, attending hackathons, and screening candidates over a phone call all need to be done individually for each candidate manually. And these screening methods aren't even effective.

Using Adaface's custom assessments for your roles to screen engineers allows recruiting leaders to set up a consistent, scalable and efficient screening process, reducing your time to screen by > 80%.

Avoid trick questions

Often, companies ask candidates to code B-trees, solve dynamic programming questions, or write an algorithm to solve Sudoku, even when the role does not require any algorithmic skill. These code puzzles are not representative of on-the-job work, and the results of such a coding test is not representative of candidate's ability to perform on the job.

From the point of view of the recruiter, code puzzles might seem like a good way to automate the screening process while also reducing bias.

Here is why using code puzzles is not a good idea:

• Code puzzles actively work against building a diverse team. Code puzzles themselves are heavily biased towards candidates with formal computer science education. This puts self-taught candidates from diverse backgrounds at a disadvantage.
• Algorithmic puzzles are biased towards recent CS graduates. Candidates with several years of experience have very little exposure to algorithms skills in their day-to-work putting them at a disadvantage.
• Code puzzles are not reflective of the work the ideal candidate would do on the job, and do not reflect a candidate's ability to be productive to the team.

At Adaface, 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.

Read more about why we started Adaface.

Shorten the process/ reduce time-to-hire

One major problem with tech hiring is the series of steps in the typical recruiting process. Most companies have about 6 to 10 steps in their process starting from a resume screen and a recruiter phone call to the final rounds of interview with the hiring manager. The most effective elimination is after the technical interview, where interviewers often realize that the candidate with the most impressive resume cannot code FizzBuzz (one of the most straightforward challenges used in tech interview). By this stage, you have already invested several hours in the hiring process with that candidates including atleast an hour with a senior engineer/ hiring manager costing your company expensive engineering time.

At Adaface, we built an automated, data-backed screening process that you can put your candidates through- you get a shortlist of the top ~20% screened, qualified candidates. Our subject matter experts customize the screening process to your company, and the specific role you are hiring for. This data enable us to make sure that the questions on the assessments are relevant, and the process identifies top engineers for your company from your candidate pipeline.

Since we automate the tech screening process, we reduce your candidate pipeline to the top ~20%, saving ~80% of your time. You can move directly to final rounds of interview with the shortlisted candidates.  

Provide a friendly candidate experience

Each Adaface assessment is a conversation with an intelligent chatbot, Ada which can present technical challenges to candidates, walk them through it and guide them when they are stuck. This enables Ada to capture their skill level accurately, and surface top candidates for you.

Adaface is built from the point of view of the candidate. Here's what we do differently from traditional skills assessment solutions:

1. 45-60 min short assessments instead of 2-3 hr assessments.
2. Friendly chatbot based interaction that does not feel like a "test".
3. High targeted to the role, with relevant questions. No puzzles. No trick questions.

Remove unconscious bias

Adaface skills assessments follow the principles of background-blind recruitment.

Background-blind recruitment essentially means that companies evaluate a candidate's ability to do the job without knowing their background- such as the where they went to school, where they were born, their past experience, their gender or picture.

Studies have shown that candidates often get screened out by AI based applicant tracking systems and by human recruiters unconsciously, because they belong to a certain race, have a certain background, or gender. This is especially true for technical roles. Often, candidates who did not study computer science are weeded out, without considering their passion in programming.

Screening candidates using Adaface's skills assessments helps companies surface qualified candidates regardless of their background. The candidates are tested on technical and coding relevant questions, picked by subject matter experts for the role you are hiring for.

Set up custom assessments for accurate screening

We don't believe in one-size-fits-all tests. Our subject matter experts set up custom assessments for each of your roles based on the job description, role requirements, experience level and must-have skills. Our test library covers 700+ skills.

We have a very high focus on the quality of questions that test for on-the-job skills. Every question is non-googleable and we have a very high bar for the level of subject matter experts we onboard to create these questions.