Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology report. I’m Mark Feffer. Today my guest is Amanda Richardson. She’s the CEO of CoderPad, an interview platform that allows candidates and managers to share and discuss their work. We’re going to talk about the challenges involved with interviewing developers, how candidates react to new technology tools, and more on this edition of PeopleTech. Hi, Amanda. Thanks for being here. So tell me about CoderPad and how does it work?
Amanda:
CoderPad is a platform for interviewing and assessing developer talent. So one of the problems we’ve really found is that as a HR professional or a recruiter or someone in talent acquisition, it’s hard to know who a good dev is and a bad devs based on their resume or their CV, and, of course, for developers, it’s equally hard to have a conversation about how good you are, how well we will work together, what skills you have. So CoderPad started as a platform for doing live technical interviews where we could code together and solve problems together. From there, we added on the ability to do an asynchronous assessment piece so you can help refine the funnel and save developer’s time to make sure they’re interviewing people that definitely have the technical skills and then they can use the live interview to make sure that the person has code quality and works in a way that you would want them to work.
Mark:
And how does it do that? Is it structured like a traditional whiteboard interview or something like that? Or have you got a new way?
Amanda:
Yeah, we are anti-white board, so it is actually an IDE, which is exactly how developers want to work and do work. So think of the traditional developer experience that you would see someone working in, and we’ve built in collaboration to that, so think Google Docs for devs, and you can work together on problems. So an interviewer can ask questions, can load questions into the console, the candidate can work on the question, you can work on them together, you can talk through how you would actually solve a problem. The interviewer can see you code, can see you work on problems, and it doesn’t have to be just a build from scratch type question because that’s often what you would ask a developer but isn’t really what they do.
And so we have a fully integrated environment, so you can start with maybe a working website or a working app, and you can make changes to it. You can start with a code base and figure out how to debug it, or do some of the more, for lack of a better word, normal things you would do on the job, but often are missed in the interview process, which makes no sense.
Mark:
Now, the workforce is changing. We’ve all read these articles, it’s getting younger. The younger employees and younger candidates want to do things more their way. How did they react to something like this?
Amanda:
We are used by the companies that probably have the younger workforce and the more technologically advanced, this is what they’re expecting. I think for a more traditional company that is handing a developer a pen and a whiteboard, or even sharing screen, it’s at best antiquated and probably has a terribly low signal to actual performance for the candidate. Giving a candidate tools where they’re used to what they’re working in, they’re comfortable solving problems, is exactly how they want to work and expect to work. And it doesn’t make any sense to ask a developer to work with a pen on a whiteboard. It’d be like hiring an email marketer and saying, “Here’s a piece of paper and a pencil, go write an email campaign.” It just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t even align with the job.
Mark:
I’m wondering also with the workforce and candidates and all of the dynamics in the tech workforce, there’s a fair number of tools out there that do something at least similar, they’re in the same church, let’s say. Are you finding that the competition has been growing in your space over the last few years?
Amanda:
I think imitation is the highest form of flattery, and that’s what I mean by people are starting to expect this. This is exactly where the market’s going. We’re proud to have been first, and I think we’re also proud to be the highest performant one. I think things that are hard to replicate come down to ease of use, reliability, performance, speed, scalability. We run millions of interviews a year across large employers, everyone in the valley uses us, and I think that shows in both our quality of product, as well as our brand recognition. So I think everybody knows this is a better way to interview, and I’m glad they’re here, and I think I welcome meeting them at any competitive fields.
Mark:
Switching to thinking about the business as opposed to the product, how do you grow a product like this? How do you expand the product, but more important, expand the market and the customer pace?
Amanda:
I think one of our biggest challenges and opportunities is convincing the 60 to 70% of interviews that are still done through either screen share or a whiteboard, or even just talking about a project, or talking about a resume and educating those hiring managers and developers that there’s a better way to assess someone’s skills and actually be able to, for lack of a better word, test drive them in the interview process. And so the market opportunity’s huge and the penetration is still very low. Beyond that, there are also a lot of use cases we’re seeing that aren’t just pure development roles. So we have a number of our customers who use us for data analytics, marketing analytics, sometimes finance roles or different parts of the organization, which may have a more technical data or technical developer component to it, but are really used for understanding how someone works, how someone thinks through the problem, and how technically proficient they are.
Mark:
I want to switch gears for a minute and ask not about CoderPad so much, but just the whole working world in tech right now. It’s always been a pretty competitive space, there’s always been a lot of candidates, very qualified, but very hard to get, hard to find. How would you describe it right now? Is it exceptionally competitive from the employer’s point of view? Are candidates having trouble finding the right job? What do you see out there?
Amanda:
It’s an interesting time in tech. I would say that the hiring pace isn’t as frenzied as it was maybe nine, 12 months ago. That’s certainly been talked about as some of the larger companies and even the smaller companies have had layoffs and shutdowns. But the other thing that’s going on is I think a number of developers are also realizing that sometimes career growth and sometimes the opportunities to grow come at other companies. We are releasing a survey that has found almost one in two developers are looking for a new job in the coming year, or in 2023 as it’s currently here, as there’s just so many jobs out there and that is an opportunity for growth. So I think while there may be less hiring, there’s more interest in movement from the developers for whatever reason, which is interesting to see.
So it will be a year of a lot of hiring and a lot of interviewing and a lot of changing. I don’t know how that will net out in total, but it’ll certainly be a very competitive year for interviewing. And look, the best talent is always hard to find no matter what the macroeconomic economy is, there’s always good ideas and there’s always good talent, and those people are just hard to attract and hard to retain.
Mark:
Well, Amanda, thanks very much. I really appreciate your time, and it was great to meet you.
Amanda:
That was very easy. Happy to meet you as well, Mark. If I can help with anything else, let me know.
Mark:
I sure will.
Amanda:
All right. Have a great rest of your day.
Mark:
My guest today has been CoderPad CEO, Amanda Richardson, and this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of RecruitingDaily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
Image: CoderPad
