We really believe in the value of hands-on experience. Building our assessments over a wider range of questions with HackerEarth ensures that they do not miss out on some candidates with specific skills.
Parthasarathi A R, CTO, RootQuotient
Case Study
How RootQuotient cut their time-to-hire by half and built an enviable tech team
About RootQuotient
RootQuotient is a product engineering company that works with new age startups. They are a strategic technology partner for startups and enterprises with a core focus on creating a holistic digital solution for client-specific needs with tech expertise in Web, Mobile, Data and Cloud.
The RootQuotient team is a group of highly talented individuals with a vision to play a major role as accelerator of Industry 4.0 technologies to democratize AI, Blockchain, and improvise human computer interactions. They have a large market of technology companies spread across the North America and European regions and help them go to market faster with minimal technical debts. To achieve this, the RootQuotient team onboards top tech talent that can assist with this digital transformation.
Challenges
Growing at a fast pace also means that the RootQuotient team needed to scale and hire a high volume of candidates in a short period of time. Being a mid-sized hiring team, they found the process of filtering and processing candidates to be extremely tedious and time consuming. While a resume-level filtering worked for them while hiring in smaller volumes, and helped in shortlisting 300 top candidates from a pool of 1000+, it became more difficult as the hiring demand increased.
Thus began the search for an assessments platform that could automate their campus recruitment engine efficiently. The recruiting team at RootQuotient was very clear that they needed a platform that supported a wide variety of questions that aren’t available on any online channels. This would help them in ensuring a fair assessment process while assessing and shortlisting from a pool of 2000-3000 candidates.
Main challenges faced by the RootQuotient team:
Large pool of candidates
Availability of questions on online channels
Time consuming manual screening
RootQuotient’s ideal hiring solution and prerequisites
RootQuotient’s campus hiring program aimed at adding more developers to their enviable tech team made of top talent from across the finest institutions in India. While onboarding candidates from a campus, they aimed to engage with the top 10% of the talent pool and thus needed assessments that were competitive and highly engaging. This ensures that they deliver the highest level of work to help with digital transformation of their clients.
They used a 2 level filtering process to shortlist candidates. A first level of MCQ based questions were used to weed out candidates who weren’t a right fit and a second in-depth round of coding assessments were used to identify the most skilled candidates.
How did HackerEarth help
The need to build a superior level of assessments meant having a library of questions and challenges that are not available on any online platforms. It also meant that they wanted to stay on top of it and needed it to be replenished continuously.
HackerEarth’s growing library of 16,000+ questions addressed this perfectly. This also meant that they could assess 900+ skills across 40+ programming languages. For every campus drive, the recruitment team started off with a MCQ test and filtered out the top 20% of the candidates by applying a cut-off score on their dashboard. These top 20% students were then invited to take a coding assessment.
Over the past 1 year, RootQuotient has onboarded 25 key members to their technical team and a few more were onboarded as interns. The recruiting team has leveraged HackerEarth’s Assessment solutions to simplify the initial screening processes at over 15 campuses they visited. They have also managed to cut down their heavy dependency on their technical team from 5-10 people to just 1 person now for choosing the questions. This frees up their tech resources to focus more on their day-to-day responsibilities.
Here are a few features that stood out and enabled the RootQuotient team to streamline their campus hiring journey:
- The two-step assessment helped in identifying top few candidates from a pool of 500-200 candidates at each campus
- The proctoring features such as candidate screenshots, question shuffling and disabled copy pasting encouraged a fair and skill-focused assessment process
- The team particularly found the health score to be of value as it helped them in removing leaked questions via a single click
- For a programming question, the code playback feature is extremely helpful in identifying the approach adopted by a candidate, how they assess the scenarios and their thought process
- A readily available and efficient CSM ensured that every single campus hiring process was smooth and streamlined
Time to hire: Reduced by half
Dependency on tech team: 85% improvement in efficiency
Number of candidates hired in the past 1 year: 25 SDEs
The streamlined process with minimal touchpoints helped in bringing down the time-to-hire from 5 working days to 2-3 days. The recruitment team had undertaken considerable research and explored 6-7 platforms before finalizing HackerEarth as their tech recruiting platform. They found HackerEarth assessments to be at a good price point given the bulk of features and value it offers. Over the past one year, the team has managed to save hours that would’ve been spent on screening candidates and have considerably saved costs. With about 25+ hires from campuses in a year, the RootQuotient recruiting team managed to achieve the targets they had set for themselves.
Outcome and Next Steps
With a growing clientele and business requirements, RootQuotient team has once again chosen HackerEarth Assessments as their trusted partner to double their technical team this year.
We're extremely skilled at assessing skills
