We don’t have technical recruiters, so our previous hiring process took engineers away from their jobs and interrupted the flow of their core work. We also realized that our traditional interview process may have excluded people that we actually want on our team. With Byteboard, we were able to improve our interviewing process—keeping it efficient and inclusive—while protecting engineers’ time.
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Jason Bauer, Engineering Manager

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Ezoic is a rapidly growing AI-based web optimization startup based in Carlsbad, California. As an early-stage company, Ezoic didn’t have a dedicated hiring team and needed to find an efficient and effective way to scale their team. After just a few months with Byteboard, Ezoic expanded their engineering team and improved their onsite-to-offer rate from less than 20% to over 45%, while saving their engineers hundreds of hours to focus on what they love: engineering.

Challenges

Ezoic’s biggest challenge was the amount they spent interviewing candidates, which impacted engineering productivity and their ability to scale up their teams quickly. Without a dedicated technical recruiting team, engineers were frequently pulled into the interviewing and preparation process. It consumed so much time. Moreover, the engineering team recognized that their traditional interview process that purely focused on algorithm questions did not provide them with a confident understanding of how a candidate may do on the job when hired. They realized they were likely disqualifying engineers that might have been great additions for their team due to their performance on theoretical interviews. They needed a new effective interview and an efficient process.

Solutions

Candidates prefer an interview experience that assesses their practical technical skills—not just theoretical algorithm knowledge asked by most online assessment tools. Byteboard assesses over 20 essential software engineering skills, providing Ezoic’s hiring team a detailed breakdown of the candidate’s strengths and areas of improvement. Byteboard interviews are project-based and designed to mimic a day-in-the-life of an engineer. With Byteboard’s assessment breakdown, the Ezoic team can quickly understand where the candidate is strong and where the areas of opportunity stand. They get a great candidate summary through a simple, easy-to-read report. It reduces the need to review the entire design document or entire coding sample, which saves a ton of time.

Results

In just a few months, Ezoic increased their onsite-to-offer rate from less than 20% to over 45%—and saved their engineers hundreds of hours of time. They no longer spend days preparing, interviewing, and assessing candidates and can focus on their most important work. Also, the Ezoic team finally has real data on how people perform on the coding and design exercises. Seeing both the coding and design portion of the assessment allows the team to understand a candidate’s full range of engineering. Engineering is more than coding.

Beyond the team’s rapid growth, Ezoic candidates enjoyed the new assessment and interviewing process. Over 87% rated their experience with Byteboard favorably.

I felt comfortable and loved that I was tested practically. I felt like I really got to showcase the kind of skill and efficiency that I would actually use in a position. And having the resources I would have in a real job scenario really made me feel like this was a great way to assess what I can do.

Ezoic Candidate, August 2020