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Why tech recruiters are switching to Adaface

Deepti Chopra

February 08, 2023

Tech hiring is hard- anyone who is involved would know.

The screening signals that recruiters typically use: fluffed-up resumes, Github profiles, StackOverflow activity, educational qualifications and previous employers are noisy.

Here's how we circumvent the typical issues with the traditional techniques used in tech hiring, by transforming the screening process.

Prevent resume fraud/ bad hires at scale

The biggest challenges with screening processes is the lack of scalability. Checking open-source projects of candidates, eyeballing resumes, attending hackathons, and screening candidates over a phone call all need to be done individually for each candidate manually. And these screening methods aren't even effective.

Using Adaface's custom assessments for your roles to screen engineers allows recruiting leaders to set up a consistent, scalable and efficient screening process, reducing your time to screen by > 80%.

Adaface enables us to conduct coding, aptitude and psychometric assessments seamlessly. My hiring managers have never been happier with the quality of candidates shortlisted. We were able to close 106 positions in a record time of 45 days!

Amit Kataria, Chief Human Resources Officer, Hanu

Hanu review

Avoid trick questions

Often, companies ask candidates to code B-trees, solve dynamic programming questions, or write an algorithm to solve Sudoku, even when the role does not require any algorithmic skill. These code puzzles are not representative of on-the-job work, and the results of such a coding test is not representative of candidate's ability to perform on the job.

From the point of view of the recruiter, code puzzles might seem like a good way to automate the screening process while also reducing bias.

Here is why using code puzzles is not a good idea:

  • Code puzzles actively work against building a diverse team. Code puzzles themselves are heavily biased towards candidates with formal computer science education. This puts self-taught candidates from diverse backgrounds at a disadvantage.
  • Algorithmic puzzles are biased towards recent CS graduates. Candidates with several years of experience have very little exposure to algorithms skills in their day-to-work putting them at a disadvantage.
  • Code puzzles are not reflective of the work the ideal candidate would do on the job, and do not reflect a candidate's ability to be productive to the team.

At Adaface, we believe that status quo tech assessment platforms are not a fair way for companies to evaluate engineers. We started Adaface to help companies find great engineers by assessing on-the-job skills required for a role.

Read more about why we started Adaface.

We evaluated several of their competitors and found Adaface to be the most compelling. Great default library of questions that are designed to test for fit rather than memorization of algorithms.

Swayam Narain, CTO, Affable

heart Affable review for Adaface

Shorten the process/ reduce time-to-hire

One major problem with tech hiring is the series of steps in the typical recruiting process. Most companies have about 6 to 10 steps in their process starting from a resume screen and a recruiter phone call to the final rounds of interview with the hiring manager. The most effective elimination is after the technical interview, where interviewers often realize that the candidate with the most impressive resume cannot code FizzBuzz (one of the most straightforward challenges used in tech interview). By this stage, you have already invested several hours in the hiring process with that candidates including atleast an hour with a senior engineer/ hiring manager costing your company expensive engineering time.

At Adaface, we built an automated, data-backed screening process that you can put your candidates through- you get a shortlist of the top ~20% screened, qualified candidates. Our subject matter experts customize the screening process to your company, and the specific role you are hiring for. This data enable us to make sure that the questions on the assessments are relevant, and the process identifies top engineers for your company from your candidate pipeline.

Since we automate the tech screening process, we reduce your candidate pipeline to the top ~20%, saving ~80% of your time. You can move directly to final rounds of interview with the shortlisted candidates.  

With Adaface, we were able to optimise our initial screening process by upwards of 75%, freeing up precious time for both hiring managers and our talent acquisition team alike!

Brandon Lee, Head of People, Love, Bonito

heart Love Bonito review for Adaface

Provide a friendly candidate experience

Each Adaface assessment is a conversation with an intelligent chatbot, Ada which can present technical challenges to candidates, walk them through it and guide them when they are stuck. This enables Ada to capture their skill level accurately, and surface top candidates for you.

Adaface is built from the point of view of the candidate. Here's what we do differently from traditional skills assessment solutions:

  1. 45-60 min short assessments instead of 2-3 hr assessments.
  2. Friendly chatbot based interaction that does not feel like a "test".
  3. High targeted to the role, with relevant questions. No puzzles. No trick questions.

We managed to remove the bias of resume based screening (which is often very subjective), reduced scheduling time down to 0 and managed to screen ~200 candidates weekly even when the entire team was on leave. Our candidates loved the chat based interface!

Ashay Tejwani, CPO, NiYO

heart NiYO review for Adaface

Remove unconscious bias

Adaface skills assessments follow the principles of background-blind recruitment.

Background-blind recruitment essentially means that companies evaluate a candidate's ability to do the job without knowing their background- such as the where they went to school, where they were born, their past experience, their gender or picture.

Studies have shown that candidates often get screened out by AI based applicant tracking systems and by human recruiters unconsciously, because they belong to a certain race, have a certain background, or gender. This is especially true for technical roles. Often, candidates who did not study computer science are weeded out, without considering their passion in programming.

Screening candidates using Adaface's skills assessments helps companies surface qualified candidates regardless of their background. The candidates are tested on technical and coding relevant questions, picked by subject matter experts for the role you are hiring for.

Love Adaface and have recommended them to many of my tech startup friends. The ease of set up and use, breadth of assessments and dashboard make screening fast and simple!

Hayley Bakker, Founder, Colibri

heart Colibri review for Adaface

Set up custom assessments for accurate screening

We don't believe in one-size-fits-all tests. Our subject matter experts set up custom assessments for each of your roles based on the job description, role requirements, experience level and must-have skills. Our test library covers 700+ skills.

We have a very high focus on the quality of questions that test for on-the-job skills. Every question is non-googleable and we have a very high bar for the level of subject matter experts we onboard to create these questions.

"The hiring managers felt that through the technical questions that they asked during the panel interviews, they were able to tell which candidates had better scores, and differentiated with those who did not score as well. They are highly satisfied with the quality of candidates shortlisted with the Adaface screening."


- Human Resources Manager, Singapore Government

Deepti Chopra

Deepti is a co-founder at Adaface. Her online persona is extroverted, but in real life she is terribly introverted and you can startle her just by calling out her name.

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