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If you took part in an interview panel around this time in 2019, the set up might have looked a bit different.

If the interview took place at the office, the first interviewer probably met the candidate in your corporate lobby. Once that interview was done, the interviewer might’ve either provided a signal or left to notify the next interviewer while the candidate waited in the room.

Today, interview “lobbies” take a different form. In many cases, the corporate lobby, interview conference room, and smooth transitions during the interview have been replaced by web conferencing purgatory, multiple interview links, and unnecessary interruptions.

These elements dramatically affect the interview experience for all participants.

In an effort to make the interview process as seamless as possible for both sides, we recently introduced a series of new features that address these challenges.

Avoid confusion with a single interview link

First and foremost, the candidate and interviewer use the same link to access the interview. Interviewers and candidates no longer have to deal with the confusion and frustration of managing multiple independent interview sessions.

Start your interviews on the right foot with the Candidate Lobby

Instead of staring at a spinning wheel within their web conferencing application, HackerRank candidates first enter a virtual waiting room before entering the interview.

The Candidate Lobby indicates the status of all participants invited to the interview and provides the candidate an opportunity to branch out into a practice session.

Interviewers are automatically notified when candidates enter the lobby and candidates enter the interview once the interviewer permits them. In addition, candidates are automatically moved back to the lobby when all the interviewers leave the interview.

This not only creates a better experience for the candidate but enables the interviewer to apply any last-minute adjustments in private before initiating the interview.

Create seamless transitions with the Interviewer Lobby

A similar lobby is available for members of the interview panel. This feature eliminates the disruption and potential bias introduced when one interviewer prematurely joins a prior interview session. It enables interviewers to evaluate the status of the interview without disrupting it and join when ready.

Leave Interview

With HackerRank, each interviewer in a panel now has the opportunity to simply leave or to end the interview entirely just as they would in an onsite experience.

This further facilitates a clean handoff from one interviewer to the next and lowers the possibility of an interviewer accidentally concludes the entire interview before the next interview session.

Elevate your interview experience today

Every HackerRank customer can take advantage of these new features simply by checking ‘Enable Virtual Lobby’ in the Interview settings page. Once enabled, the Virtual Lobby features will apply to all subsequent interviews scheduled within HackerRank.

The combination of these features will transform a disorganized set of individual interview sessions into a single, contiguous interview experience that your candidates will love.

Not a HackerRank customer? No problem. Click the banner below to start interviewing with HackerRank's Virtual Lobby.

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As a product manager at HackerRank, Raghav Gopalakrishnan is committed to creating great interview experiences for candidates and interviewers alike. Overseeing both CodePair* and developer experience, Raghav leverages his background in engineering to empower customers to create more effective, candidate-friendly technical interviews. He’s passionate about building intuitive and impactful products.

The post Elevate Your Interview Experience with the HackerRank Virtual Lobby appeared first on HackerRank Blog.

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Last month, we hosted our largest HackerRank.main() event ever and announced the launch of our end-to-end remote hiring solution: the Developer Skills Platform.

But we didn’t do it alone. We spoke with thought leaders from across the globe about how they’re addressing the evolving challenges of hiring the right developers and scaling their engineering teams remotely. 

One of the sessions included an insightful interview with David O’Brien, Group Technology Workforce Management at UBS. 

Click here for the full interview or scroll down for key highlights.

Our CMO, Jennifer Stagnaro, led the discussion as David shared how his team used HackerRank to standardize their remote hiring process as well as improve the candidate experience. 

Here are a few key takeaways from this talk:

1. Understand what technology can offer you, and rebuild and redefine the recruitment process from there 

David’s recruitment challenge was the high volume of candidates made it discern if they were bringing the right talent into the organization. He wanted to equip his team with the right tech tools to assess skills with screening, process, assessment, and evaluation.

“Once we piloted HackerRank, there was lots of excitement around having the virtual Whiteboarding to code,” says David. “It resonated with the hiring managers because they can sit together with their candidates over an interview and actually get down to the nuts and bolts and get into the culture of what we do.”

David also mentioned the Scorecard functionality made life easy for the hiring managers to give feedback on the spot instead of waiting an hour or so later to provide that information.

2. Standardize skills globally 

It’s no secret the COVID era has presented its own wealth of challenges for organizations. According to Gartner, 88% of the organizations, worldwide, made it mandatory or encouraged their employees to work from home after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.

While it’s forced companies to fast-track remote collaboration, it has also provided an opportunity for organizations to widen their talent reach. Being remote means hiring is no longer limited to the talent available in your geographical area.   

According to David, this “leads to greater flexibility, higher quality, and a more diverse talent pool.” However, this only strengthens the argument for a standardized assessment of candidates. 

David wanted to define a standardized set of skills to vet their contingent workforce as well. “That’s why we brought in HackerRank,” says David. “we wanted to have a global standard of engineering talent coming into group technology. We have a huge contingent workforce. So, we wanted to make sure that we have the same measurement for our contingent workforce. And we actually use exactly the same tests for internal and contingency hiring.”

3. Invest in a tech council

You can source the highest quality candidates from across the globe but if they don’t fit within the needs of your team, consider them useless. 

That’s why David recommends establishing a tech council that can identify the specific skills and qualifications needed for the role.  

“We wanted to make sure that the candidates and the feedback that they’re getting were tied to the skill sets that the hiring managers wanted to see,” says David.

David also says having a tech council establishes more of an invested relationship between the hiring manager and candidate. 

“It’s critical for the content to be driven by technologists,” says David. “That way, the hiring managers have more of an appreciation for the candidates they’re getting out of the process.”

4. Learn how to attract candidates to your organization

Hiring should be a two-way street—the process should be insightful for both the hiring manager and the candidate.

David and his team recommend keeping the candidate experience top of mind when reevaluating your recruitment process. HackerRank helps this do this by allowing hiring managers to be communicative and transparent with the candidates. 

“We had an ‘a-ha’ moment once the initial tests were built,” says David. “We really shifted the mindset and improved the candidate experience as well as the overall quality of what our hiring managers could do with candidates, especially in the CodeScreen* aspect.”

But improving the candidate experience doesn’t end there. David hopes to not only seek out high-quality candidates but draw them to UBS as well. 

“We’re discovering new ways of not processing candidates, but attracting candidates also to the organization,” says David. “And by using HackerRank, we’re actually improving the tech image of UBS.”

*Disclaimer: This blog post contains messaging around the “CodePair” and “CodeScreen” features which are now called “Interview” within the HackerRank product as of 10/06/20.

The post How UBS Standardized Their Remote Hiring Process to Globally Scale Their Tech Team with HackerRank appeared first on HackerRank Blog.

If you’re in the market to hire the best tech talent, having a smooth and fine-tuned candidate experience will place your company steps ahead of the competition. 

And it makes sense. Every step of your hiring process, from the language in your job posting, to the timing of your candidate assessment, to the on-site interview, gives candidates a preview of your company’s mission, product, and culture. With today’s competitive tech talent market, one mishap or error during the interview process is enough to turn off interested and talented candidates.

In our latest webinar brought to you by HackerRank and Workable, Amy Miller, Senior Technical Recruiter at Amazon 126 Lab, Sean Echevarria, the Senior Product Manager for Walmart, and Blane Shields, HackerRank’s Director of Customer Success, share common hurdles in the interview process and what you can do to improve your candidate experience. Read on to discover what metrics you should be benchmarking in your hiring process, trends worth paying attention to in the technical hiring space, and what role technology plays in your candidate experience.

Metrics you should be benchmarking throughout the hiring process

Choosing the right recruiting metrics is a crucial step in creating a stellar end-to-end candidate experience. While it’s necessary to pay attention to well-known benchmarks like time to fill and candidate acceptance rate, it’s also important to keep an eye on metrics that are a little more granular. 

Candidate drop-off

There are multiple stages within the interview process, and benchmarking candidate drop-off at every part of the funnel will identify the segments in your interview process that need improvement. 

“How many people do you lose after the initial phone screen, how many people are you losing because your interview process is too long or convoluted? Tracking the acceptance rate is important but recruiters need to track candidate drop off at every level. If you’re not really paying attention to every step of the funnel, you’re missing the opportunity to improve it for everyone,” says Amy.

Paul says that tracking drop-off at every stage of the hiring process is a part of Walmart’s hiring practice. But he believes that focusing on the most prominent problem areas in your hiring process—instead of trying to repair every single touchpoint—is the quickest way to strengthen your candidate experience. 

“The question that gets asked the most often through normal ATS’s is ‘What’s the reason you didn’t accept this offer?’ and if the answer is specifically for the onsite experience, then fix your onsite experience and don’t do anything else for a quarter, and see how you’ve made a difference,” Paul says.

Engagement

Candidate engagement throughout your interview process is another important metric to track. Paul says that some of the most valuable engagement data points tech recruiters should track are email open rates, how quickly candidates are flowing through the pipeline, when they fall out of the pipeline, and feedback. 

For engagement, Amy says she records two metrics: 1. her number of outreach responses, and 2. how many candidates drop-off during assessments. Measuring the number of people that respond back to her first pitch helps Amy know when her messaging misses the mark. When using HackerRank to assess the skills of potential candidates, Amy says, a large drop-off rate signals that she introduced the assessment portion of the interview too soon. 

 “We should pay attention to how many people are dropping out. If people are opting out, that’s something we need to look for. Are we involving assessments too soon in the process before they’re really sold on the opportunity? Are we spacing them appropriately?” says Amy.

Blane says that the best time to introduce an assessment varies case by case, but HackerRank’s Test Health Dashboard can help identify the timing that performs best for your team.

“You have to find the right point in time to insert that technical assessment. It could depend on seniority level, it could depend on is it a referral or inbound application—there’s a lot of different factors you have to consider depending on the role, volume, low volume—and then also making sure you get that feedback in real-time. We closely track all those metrics in our Test Health Dashboard so we can provide real-time feedback,” says Blane. 

Onboarding

Onboarding is the final stage in the hiring process that can make or break your candidate experience. Both Blane and Amy believe that creating a structured onboarding process gets new hires excited to join the company. Benchmarking metrics like new hire drop-offs or onboarding survey sentiment will give you some insight into the strength of your onboarding process.

“We take pride in our onboarding experience,” says Blane, “We actually have every leader from every department sit with all new hires to give them a crash course on every department’s goals and incentives, which leads to a really strong candidate onboarding experience. New hires come in and they have a really strong understanding of how the organization works as a whole, and how we’re working together with one common mission—and that’s something that we’ve found really helpful and we’ve gotten really strong feedback from our candidates.”

“Onboarding starts from the time the offer is signed,” says Amy, “If a company makes the mistake of not staying close to the candidate once they accept an offer, you can lose people. Especially in this market with counter offers being so prevalent. We should be paying attention to the onboarding candidate experience and we should be tracking it.” 

Trends in the technical hiring space

With the competition in today’s tech talent world, companies and recruiters are keeping their eyes peeled for the hiring trends that will flood their inbox with applications from the best candidates. Here’s what Blane, Amy, and Sean have to say about today’s trends and whether you should implement them into your hiring strategy:

Small companies are getting creative for the Gen Z workforce

As Director of Customer Success, Blane supports HackerRank customers across industries, segments, and company sizes with their recruiting efforts. One trend he’s noticed? Small companies are more willing and able to try out hiring trends, especially when it comes to attracting Gen Z employees. 

“With the new flood of talent entering the workforce, there are different approaches and methods you have to take to attract them, and small companies are trying different things,” says Blane, “With large organizations, a lot of the processes can be a lot more difficult to change. So I’d say the trend with some of the smaller companies and mid-size companies we’re working with—especially tech companies—is that they’re trying a lot of different strategies with candidate engagement, whether that’s doing something unique at a career fair, or plugging in a HackerRank assessment, or doing some sort of panel interview at an onsite.”

Branded content is king

In Sean’s experience, one recruiting trend that works for Walmart is branded content. Having a mix of on-brand evergreen content and fresh content that represents each of the teams your recruiter is hiring for, is a great resource recruiters can use to quickly showcase the company culture, values, and mission.

“One of the things we’ve done internally here is build out toolkits that people can tap into,” says Sean, “If you have someone recruiting to Data Scientists, they know what’s going to really catch their eye and the right message to send them. But in order to create that brand consistency, recruiters need something to pull from so they’re not just sending candidates Word documents. So we’ve built out toolkits to help recruiters fill in the blanks.” 

Sean recommends you should keep the following on hand:

• Company articles
• A list of the hiring manager’s candidate expectations
• Videos or quotes of employees from your latest talent branding campaign

Not all trends are one-size-fits-all

In Amy’s technical recruiting experience, she’s learned that it’s wise to resist being distracted by the hottest trend and stick to the tools and methods that work. As far as tech tools go, Amy believes that there’s not a one-size-fits-all platform that will work for every candidate. But there are tools that will help you streamline your hiring process and produce a smooth candidate experience.

“There should be some structure and you want to be mindful of treating all engineers the same, and assessing in the same way. And that’s where HackerRank comes in as really helpful. It allows everyone to go through the same process, and there’s some value there,” says Amy.

How to evaluate and choose new interviewing tools

The human resources (HR) technology market is growing at an accelerated pace: currently, more than 12 million companies are spending a combined $5 trillion on HR technology. With so many emerging recruiting  platforms and interviewing tools, here’s what Sean, Amy, and Blane say you should keep in mind before investing:

Make sure your new tool is easy to integrate and easy for candidates to navigate

At Walmart, Sean says they test two things before moving forward with a new hiring technology: 1. how does the technology integrate into their other platforms, and 2. does this tool provide a seamless candidate experience?

“The more you fold in assessments and other tools, the more clicks you’re making candidates go through when they’re expecting a seamless interaction,” says Sean. 

Having internal employees test and weigh in on new tools will give you a more accurate view of whether it’s right for your hiring process.

“Make sure you personally know what that candidate has to go through so if they do experience any issues, you can help troubleshoot, and you know what to do about it,” Sean says.

Make sure the results are relevant

According to Amy, next to evaluating a new hiring technology’s ease of use, you should also analyze how relevant its results are.

“You want to make sure that the results of an assessment tool are relevant, and the results help you see deeper into the candidates background and skills to determine whether they are a fit for the job,” says Amy. “Is it a personality assessment? I don’t like that. But is it a technically relevant exercise or test? Great. Make it easy for the candidate to use, make it easy for the candidate to navigate, and make it really, really relevant, and help them understand the why.”

Use a technology that gives your candidates a preview of their day-to-day work

In Blane’s experience, he’s seen that if a developer is asked to undergo a skills assessment, it’s best practice to create an assessment that mimics the work they’d do in the role they're applying for. 

“We encourage our customers to create assessments that are very specific to the role so the candidate has a really good understanding [of the role]: ‘If I accept this role, these are the kind of things I’ll be doing on a daily basis,’” says Blane

Making assessments that showcase the skills needed and the duties of the role itself will ensure the candidate is clear on the job’s expectations.

“We’ve found that it also leads to much more productive conversations at later stages in the interview cycle,” says Blane, “Especially looking at technical hiring, engineers are doing whiteboarding sessions, they’re doing CodePair sessions, they’re interacting with the candidate’s code and making sure they have that skill. So the more easily you can relate to the day-to-day the stack that you’re using—which languages, which frameworks—it makes the conversations much more productive later on in the process.”

The post What’s Wrong With Your Candidate Experience (And How to Fix It) appeared first on HackerRank Blog.

In the tech talent world, having a standout candidate experience is a prerequisite to attracting developers. It’s what helps us stay ahead in an increasingly competitive talent landscape. But recruiters can only control so much of it.

Obviously, recruiters can’t shape every aspect of the candidate experience—things like historic brand impressions and hiring manager interactions are out of their hands. But as a major stakeholder on the hiring team, they can advocate for the candidate from start to finish. So what’s the most effective way to promote a candidate-first process within the team?

To learn how recruiters can influence candidate experience, I sat down with Derek Ling, Founder & CEO at Better. As a part of Better, Derek helps companies build efficient, world-class candidate experiences that help them stand apart in a competitive market.

In our discussion, we explored 3 key things that recruiters can do to influence candidate experience. Here’s what we covered:

1. Keep the focus on “why,” not “how”

The key to crafting a candidate-first experience starts with the recruiter/candidate relationship. Once you’ve verified that the candidate has the skills for the role, you need to understand why they’d take the role in the first place.

Learn what motivates them

According to Derek, that starts with understanding your candidate’s motivation. For the candidates he sources, he likes to start with a simple question: why did you respond to my outreach? The first reason, presumably, is because you wrote an engaging message. But more often than not, the candidate is responding to a specific aspect of your message: maybe they’re a fan of your brand, or they’re looking to work more with the technologies this role will utilize.

Check candidate:hiring manager alignment

Focusing on the core of their motivation can help shape the rest of their experience, too. Once you know why they’re interested in the job, relay that information back to your hiring manager. Let’s say they want to take the job because they’re interested in pursuing a high growth career path: is that something your hiring manager is willing to support? Does the candidate’s 5-year plan align with the vision your hiring manager has for the role?

Aligning high-level motivations up front will help weed out false positives early on. It ensures you only pass candidates that suit the skills and the context of the role. In the same token, it makes sure you don’t waste the time of a candidate that won’t be a strong team fit.

2. Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach

Most tech recruiters cover a variety of roles. But that doesn’t mean the same recruiting process should apply to every role. If you want to make candidate experience your focal, you have to be willing to create a unique workflow for every role.

For example, with more junior candidates, or for high volumes of inbound applications, you can kick the process off with a skills assessment. But for a more senior candidate, or for lower volume roles that require outbound sourcing, you might save skills evaluations for later in the process. Your ideal workflow will shift by role, and by the flow of your funnel.

You can also tweak your process around the needs of a particular candidate. Say you’ve found a candidate that’s a great skills fit, and seems to be a great team fit, too—but they’re not 100% sold on life at your company. You could consider adding an extra step to the recruiting process, bringing them on-site for a casual, meet-and-greet lunch with the team. They can get face time with the team, and start to envision themselves at your company. Putting in the effort to recognize when the candidate needs extra support can help increase your odds of success.

3. Make candidate advocacy your mission

Recruiters are the candidate’s ultimate advocate. As the candidate’s primary touchpoint from initial contact to on boarding, they’re the first resource a candidate will turn to when they need support. And on the flip side, they’re responsible for vocalizing the candidate’s career interests throughout the hiring process. That means aligning with the hiring manager, interviewers, and leadership teams to ensure there’s a strong fit. That relationship is a strong opportunity to create a lasting connection with the candidate—and ultimately, to shore up offer acceptance rates down the line.

Prioritize the candidate’s needs

To be a true candidate ally, Derek says, you have to prioritize their needs. That starts at sourcing. Derek likes to provide as much information as he can up front: who they’d be working with, what they’d be working on, what the company mission is, and more. No secrets, no hook to get them on the phone—just an honest, clear representation of the role at hand. It’ll help you earn trust from the start.

Position yourself as their go-to contact

And for Derek, it doesn’t stop there. To build a natural connection, he likes to stay in close communication throughout the interview process. It means reaching out to the candidate every time there’s a company touch point. Just scheduled for an onsite? Send them a message a few days beforehand to see if they have any questions. Advancing to a second round of interviews? Reach out to gauge their feedback, and to give them an idea of what to expect.

By positioning yourself as a constant throughout the hiring process, you’ll help them feel valued in the process, and will help avoid common communication pitfalls. And even if they aren’t a fit, you still leave a lasting, positive impression on them. It leaves the door open for other roles down the line.

How do you advocate for candidate experience at your organization? Learn more about how to create a candidate-centric brand in our guide:

Blane Shields is the Head of the Customer Success team for North America at HackerRank. His team focuses on making sure that our customers are happy, providing best practices to ensure they find efficiency in technical hiring.

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