Assessments

How ZALORA shortened its recruitment cycle by 50%

HackerEarth Recruit has been helpful to ZALORA’s recruitment team. We’ve been working with HackerEarth for 3 years and we are happy with its Recruit platform. The support team is doing a good job; each time help is needed, it takes the team less than an hour to jump onto the issue and solve it. The HackerEarth team works hard to offer its clients the best possible service and experience. I’m happy with HackerEarth, and I look forward to continue working with it in the foreseeable future.

Phuong Huynh

Technical Recruiter

About ZALORA

Launched in 2012, ZALORA is a fashion e-commerce platform, with a presence in Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. It is a part of the Global Fashion Group, the world’s leading online fashion and lifestyle destination in growth markets.

ZALORA offers a range of top international and local brands, designer apparel, as well as in-house labels across shoes, clothing, accessories, etc., for men, women, and children. Headquartered in Singapore and in Malaysia, it is a privately-owned company, with approximately 1,500 employees worldwide. ZALORA has over 200,000 fashion products and is considered the leading technology-powered fashion player in Southeast Asia.

Challenges

ZALORA hires both experienced developers and fresh graduates, in a percentage ratio of 70:30 (approx.), respectively. While the experienced developers are usually assessed based on their knowledge of data structures and system design, the fresh graduates are judged on their understanding of basic algorithms, knowledge of coding skills, and ability to learn new technologies.

Traditional hiring systems complicated recruitment processes

Without skill-based assessment tools, the recruitment team at ZALORA found it challenging and time-consuming to judge the coding skills of developers.

“When we did not have an assessment platform in place, it was challenging for us to judge the developer’s coding skills and their algorithm knowledge.” – Phuong Huynh, Technical Recruiter, ZALORA

ZALORA was not satisfied with its traditional hiring process for recruitment. Going through the profile of each developer manually and then interviewing them made the entire process cumbersome and time-consuming.

“When developers attend interviews, we dedicate a lot of time. For instance, for each role, we get at least ten candidate applications. Normally, for each candidate, we would end up investing an hour for interviewing. Imagine doing that for ten people. Also, in the end, only 20% of candidates are selected, which means a lot of time is wasted.” – Phuong Huynh, Technical Recruiter, ZALORA

In addition, hiring through this process delayed the time to roll out an offer to a promising candidate – it took a month to finally close an offer. This process took a toll on scaling ZALORA’s recruitment process and normalizing the interview-to-hire ratio.

Before HackerEarth Recruit, ZALORA tried its hands on another test assessment platform. However, the complicated user interface and high pricing were a hassle. The inability to customize assessments as per its business requirements didn’t work well for ZALORA. The company wanted to opt for a more customized assessment solution that would best suit its needs.

Enter HackerEarth Recruit

ZALORA has been using HackerEarth Recruit for the past 3 years and is satisfied with the product experience. The company has been using the platform to hire top technical talent for its offices in Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam. They switched over to HackerEarth Recruit because of the flexibility, customization, and the user-friendly interface offered by the platform. In 2018, using Recruit, ZALORA hired 35 developer candidates for different job openings.

Scaling with HackerEarth Recruit

Reduction in turnaround time: HackerEarth Recruit helped ZALORA hire the best applicants in the least possible turnaround time. With HackerEarth Recruit, the recruitment team could auto-evaluate submissions based on logical correctness, memory usage, syntax correctness, and time efficiency. ZALORA witnessed a drastic reduction in the interview-to-hire time, reducing it from 30 days to 14 days.

Analyze candidate performance to streamline interviews: With HackerEarth Recruit, each candidate’s detailed performance report was available. The detailed analysis offered by these reports helped the team gather minute details such as the time taken by a candidate to complete a test, his/her performance across different test sections, questions, and even replay the keystrokes of a written code. This detailed analysis enabled recruiters and hiring managers to assess the strength and weakness of a candidate, enabling them to streamline their interview process.
Customize test experience for candidates: Recruit allowed ZALORA to customize coding tests parameters, such as difficulty levels, duration, marking schemes, cut-off scores, criteria, and much more. Hence, Customize test experience for candidates could come up with customized skilled-based tests for different roles.
Improvement in candidate quality: ZALORA witnessed an enhancement in the quality of candidates attending the face-to-face interview. A staggering 70% of candidates that passed the assessments using Recruit were hired.

The quality of the shortlisted candidates has increased. With Recruit, 47% of candidates pass the test, out of which 70% candidates are hired. However, earlier, the percentage of candidates hired was much lesser