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Customer Stories

Front-loading the Hiring Process: How Seismic is Maximizing Recruiting Time

Written By Nicolette Garcia | March 28, 2019

Seismic is changing the way sales and marketing teams are sharing and distributing content. Their cloud-based software equips sales teams with personalized content proven to be the most effective for any buyer interaction, analytics around buyer engagement, and automation to reduce workload. Seismic arms marketers with content performance analytics, which reveal what is really driving revenue and what needs to be adjusted. This allows teams to improve their impact on the bottom line. Their innovative solutions leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to optimize sales content.

To support their growth and continued innovation, Seismic needed technical talent that was comfortable navigating the complexities of their architecture and could develop flexible and reusable code.

Challenge: efficiently finding quality tech talent

Seismic was bringing a high volume of qualified developer candidates on-site, but few were extended offers. Many candidates had strong resumes but their skills didn’t meet the criteria during the on-site technical assessment. It was clear that they needed a stronger screening process.

The first step in optimizing their process was including a high-level design challenge during the phone screen. While this brought them closer to what they needed, they were still finding gaps in the process. Candidates would do well on the high-level design challenge but lacked strong coding skills.

Quote from Jaime Onofre, Senior Talent Partner at Seismic on how Hackerrank has helped his team

Solution: stronger screening upfront

CodeScreen allows Seismic to assess a candidate’s coding ability even before a pair-programming session. The team utilizes HackerRank’s robust question library to build out their coding challenges. Once all candidates take the assessment, a score report ranks them based on their performance. But instead of relying on these scores to narrow down candidates, Seismic manually reviews each submission.

The additional time they were spending on on-site interviews is now used to thoughtfully review candidate code. This holistic approach allows them to assess more than just coding abilities. What was this candidate’s approach? How did they structure their code? Is it flexible? Many questions can be answered by reviewing a candidate’s code. High scores on the coding and high-level design challenges were strong indicators that the candidate would perform well during the rest of the interview process and receive an offer.

Valuing collaboration

Since implementing HackerRank, Seismic’s highly technical interview process has become more streamlined. They strive to maintain a high bar for talent, without being exclusive. While expectations are high, their process allows candidates to showcase their technical skills and ability to collaborate.

Using CodePair to conduct pair-programming sessions helps them gauge candidates’ affinity for collaboration while offering a deeper dive into their technical abilities. Engineering managers get a better understanding of a candidate’s thought process while previewing how they’ll work through problems together.

Improving recruiting and engineering alignment

While Jaime’s team plays a supporting role for the engineering organization, both teams view their working relationship as a true collaborative partnership. Although they can’t extend offers to every candidate they meet, the engineering team has expressed “there’s no one we’ve met with that we feel like we’ve wasted our time with.” -- a true testament to the level of quality candidates Jaime’s team is bringing in. The lines of communication are always open, keeping both teams aligned which maximizes time and recruiting effort.

Abstract, futuristic image generated by AI

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