How Soliton reached a new audience with hiring challenge
About Soliton Technologies
A leading global provider of design validation automation software consulting and standardization services for semiconductor companies, Soliton enables its customers to improve their engineering productivity across various stages of the product development lifecycle. Soliton works with global companies, from startups to Fortune 500, across industries including Semiconductor, Medical Devices, Automotive, and Robotics to help increase their competitiveness through digital transformation.
Started in 1997 as the first National Instruments Alliance Member in India, Soliton has a range of engineering skill sets for system design. These multidisciplinary engineering teams regularly work together to successfully complete complex systems engineering projects.
The five time consecutive winner of ‘Outstanding Technical Resources Award (Alliance)’ from National Instruments, Soliton helps its customers standardize and implement purpose-built platforms and solutions. Soliton is also the recipient of the Texas Instruments’ ‘Supplier Excellence Award’ and the Frost & Sullivan ‘Customer Value Leadership Award for Post-Silicon Validation Solutions’.
The purpose behind the hiring challenge
Soliton has practiced traditional means of hiring for a long time and were ready to move to newer ways of hiring. Heavily reliant on job posting sites with some support from third-party consultants, the sourcing was a long-drawn and time-consuming process. The marketing team and hiring team at Soliton believed that a hiring challenge would meet both their branding and hiring needs – a conclusion they reached after comparing 3 additional platforms.
The Soliton hiring team found the perfect high-intent audience in the HackerEarth developer community. Additionally, the HackerEarth team was able to find a solution that fit perfectly within their requirements and was also economical. HackerEarth’s past history of having conducted similar hiring challenges and delivering favorable results gave the team the confidence to trust HackerEarth and move forward.
Format of the hiring challenge
The hiring challenge was designed to fill several open lateral positions at Soliton and the team was looking for developers with experience in C#, LabView, and web technologies. The C# hiring challenge consisted of MCQ and programming questions, and was targeted at candidates with 1-10 years of experience. The social promotions and campaigns for the challenge generated a talent pipeline of 1228 candidates.
Candidates who secured above the average score made it to the next rounds of virtual interviews. From the 1228 applicants, 100 candidates were shortlisted and selected for the technical and leadership interviews. These candidates were further split into 2 sets based on their scores and test reports. In about 2-3 months, the team wrapped up interviews with both these sets of candidates.
How did HackerEarth help
The hiring challenge gave the brand an opportunity to get in front of a wider audience and screen top candidates from this wide pool of applicants. Without the platform, the recruitment team at Soliton would have taken more than six months to screen this number of candidates. The present size of the recruitment team did not allow them to invest so much time in screening, and the AI-enabled assessment platform saved this valuable time. With HackerEarth, they could complete the entire process in under a month, allowing them to spend their spare time on decision making.
A customized hiring challenge page with a facility to add brand elements gave the Soliton team much needed visibility at the most affordable cost. The ability to showcase the brand and put it out there amongst a focused audience was a major marketing goal and HackerEarth made it possible with minimal bandwidth drain.
Time to screen and assess candidates cut-down from 6 months to under 1 month
8 open positions filled through the hiring challenge
Outcome
The hiring team at Soliton managed to fill about 8 open positions in their engineering team through the hiring challenge.
The branded hiring challenge also delivered a higher traction to their website and good word of mouth publicity amongst the developer community.
Experience and next steps
The recruitment team was happy with the hiring challenge experience and found it to be a smooth sailing with the HackerEarth support. Given the visibility the first edition of the C# hiring challenge has delivered, the marketing team plans to make this a recurring hiring challenge.
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