Enabling tech hiring for Chordify

Chordify is a premier consulting player with 65 years of IT services and project experience. The company has differentiated by addressing one of the most vexing challenges in a growing business – enabling quality hiring for niche skills using its network and database of highly talented professionals. This has empowered several early-stage technology companies and large enterprises to maintain their competitive advantage.

Chordify had a focused methodology toward its lateral workforce hiring. However, its hiring managers devoted significant time in identifying the right candidates before commencing the interview process. A long list of considerations such as recruitment needs, skill levels, and competency gaps prolonged the activity, with multiple interview rounds.

Chordify also assisted clients by offering its consultants as temporary employees for external projects. The client involvement was high during the shortlisting process as it needed to consider various parameters, from comprehending the consultants’ perception of the problems to their potential of solving them. Hence, they often dealt with a disproportionately large number of resumes to ensure the clients received the best quality talent. It was a time-consuming and complicated process for all stakeholders, often resulting in losing out on onboarding the best talent.

Additionally, hiring managers at Chordify were expected to comprehensively screen quality technical candidates, customized as per requirements. However, as they were often hiring for specific expertise, each candidate could have the same background and expectations as those on-boarded in general.

Hence, there was often limited clarity about the precise hiring requirement, coupled with the HRs limited knowledge of the expansive technical domain. Regrettably, the company would either end up shortlisting applicants without testing their skills or design unreasonably challenging assessments, filtering out even the most deserving ones. Hence, the problems mentioned-above hindered the company’s ability to foster a continually competitive technical recruitment process with quality talent delivery. It realized that enhanced assessment would enable it to execute contextual and successful hiring.

Chordify realized the need to gain a holistic overview of candidates’ potential by assessing their skills. It also wanted to speed up the time-to-hire while boosting quality decision-making. Chordify believed in sifting through a massive pool of candidates, and making better selection decisions from the onset would ensure reliable and successful hiring, internally and externally.

Thus, Chordify was actively exploring a partner that could employ innovation to deal with its gamut of challenges, including:

• Robust assessments and simulators

Chordify hired and built winning teams for various niche technical roles. However, certain inefficiencies hindered the process. Therefore, it wanted to employ a dynamic, secure and scalable battery of coding assessments and simulators to comprehensively assess and evaluate candidates on knowledge, skills and roles. It wanted to reduce the hiring time and scale technical hiring efforts. Additionally, the solution needed to be location-agnostic and language-agnostic, supporting all major technologies and roles.

• Candidate profile measurement

Chordify wanted to chart the growth plans of candidates and existing employees by measuring their skills, personality and abilities. An in-depth analysis of their hidden skills, strengths and weaknesses could be leveraged by the companies’ L&D department to integrate a signature training approach. It meant the company would work on candidates’ skills and traits specific to technical professions to maximize their chances of success. This would consequently improve Chordify’s selection and hiring quality, benefitting all stakeholders.

• Proctoring solutions with anti-cheating features

Chordify did not wish to micro-manage the applicants by continually invigilating them. It believed the hiring team could focus elsewhere, on more important matters, than proctoring the applicants. Therefore, it needed a platform with proctoring solutions and state-of-the-art anti-cheating features to save time and negate dishonesty or misconduct.

• Credible score report

Chordify witnessed bias and undue favors during the interview process by the external panel, which was discounting the effort of its hiring managers. Chordify wanted to deter decision-makers from wrongful shortlisting and optimize the efforts of those involved. Therefore, it sought an evidence-based analysis with detailed automated reports that would be an excellent predictor of a candidate’s potential and performance. It could guarantee authenticity and ensure only the most deserving candidates were selected.

• Customized proposition

On average, Chordify was sifting through forty resumes a day to find the right technical professionals with niche skills across job levels. It included analytics, data science, data engineer, mobile developer, software quality assurance and several such IT roles. Therefore, it needed the flexibility to design assessments while having access to question banks for diverse programming languages and technologies.

Chordify wanted its requirements to be supported by highly-automated systems and technology. It examined several options before partnering with Mercer | Mettl.

Mercer | Mettl gained detailed insights into Chordify’s hiring strategy

It deduced that by offering significant filters along the hiring process, the hiring managers at Chordify could prevent shortcomings in employee hiring, training and performance quality.

After extensive discussions, Mercer | Mettl’s team suggested combining application and knowledge-based assessments for successful hiring. It was a transparent, fair and timesaving package that addressed Chordify’s concerns.

Mercer | Mettl engaged two innovative and practical solutions, including best-in-class coding assessments and a unique simulator – ‘Mettl I/O’ – to test real-world coding skills. The solutions were backed by Mercer | Mettl’s AI proctoring to conduct secure virtual coding tests.

Here’s how the combination solved Chordify’s challenges.

A) Coding assessments

Mercer | Mettl’s digital assessments offered an unmatched array of technical questions, suiting new-age programming languages, frameworks, technologies and skills requirements, evaluating potential candidates. They provided a comprehensive summary of candidates’ coding knowledge.

Mercer| Mettl coding assessments provided the following solutions:

Assessments to filter the best

The coding assessment platform offered an extensive programming test library, replete with 100,000+ technical questions for 300+ skills, enabling Chordify to devise assessments using Mercer| Mettl’s exhaustive question bank. Also:

• A user-friendly and well-defined test setting helped the hiring managers set up the applicants’ exams using multiple question types instantaneously.
• The diversity of the questions helped Chordify gauge the candidates’ technical expertise and future thinking.
• Whether novices or experts, the variety and complexity of questions, and the coverage of topics and skills, offered Chordify an accurate picture of the candidates’ comprehensive fit for the required positions.
• Chordify proactively established the candidates’ updated profiles, offering the clients the real picture.
• Transparency negated any negative impact during the shortlisting round.
• The candidates that met Chordify’s essential coding criteria were proceeded to the second round, using Mercer | Mettl I/O.

B) Mercer | Mettl I/O

Chordify wanted to identify its experienced applicants’ technological expertise. Hence, this unique, all-in-one role-based simulator evaluated them using real-world, hands-on and project-based tasks. With the most extensive library of coding simulators, spanning all major tools and technologies used in the technology industry, Mercer | Mettl I/O was used to understand the candidates’ depth of coding skills.

Mercer | Mettl I/O provided the following solutions:

1. A fully configurable and customizable environment:

With best-in-class IDEs and tools, Mettl I/O enabled Chordify to access a comprehensive coding environment to evaluate developers, QA Engineers and several other such roles.

• The liberty to leverage a real coding environment enabled Chordify to test candidates on various cases and real-life coding scenarios.
• It enabled Chordify to define the resources needed, along with software, packages, libraries and language-agnostic question creation.
• Chordify framed the problem statement along with the project’s structure and the files within.

2. Insight into real-life coding skills:

By using Mettl I/O’s integrated development environment, Chordify allowed the candidates to solve a customized coding problem in their preferred programming language.

• Chordify gained a well-rounded overview of their hands-on experience and the agility to run complex projects or traditional codes
• Chordify evaluated on-the-spot coding proficiency
• As opposed to assessing the coders’ quality of code and modus operandi, Chordify assessed them on several parameters such as code quality, efficiency, correctness and scalability, etc.
• A feature called plagiarism checker detected the probability of the candidates using partially similar as well as copied codes from the Internet for better decision-making
• Chordify also gained an understanding of their thought process and executed the entire program using Code Playback 
• An added code inspection and analysis layer using SonarQube enabled Chordify to inspect the quality of the written code – it performed automatic reviews with static analysis of code to detect bugs, code smells and security vulnerabilities

3.  Access to an exhaustive and rare ‘tech stack’:

Mettl I/O offered Chordify a comprehensive coding environment for all major programming roles (Front-end, Back-end, Database, Full Stack, Data Science, DevOps, QA engineers, etc.) supporting all major languages and technologies.

• Chordify integrated JupyterLab as the interface for analyzing Data Science and/or Machine Learning candidates. Jupyter was an industry-adopted professional tool used by data scientists and machine learning engineers to analyze data, build models and complex data-based algorithms
• An exclusive web-based terminal was leveraged for Linux system admin and DevOps roles, different from traditional software development roles.

C) Live proctoring with candidate authentication and lockdown browser:

Technical assessment aside, maintaining the integrity of the test and the company was a significant concern. Therefore, a dynamic set of proctoring features were employed, with a stricter focus on monitoring, analysis and scrutiny to maintain Chordify’s integrity.

1. 3-point candidate authentication:

Given the technical applicant pool’s diversity and the fact that remote assessments were becoming common, Chordify was particular about ensuring that only genuine applicants were taking the assessments. Hence, the Mercer | Mettl team enabled a 3-point candidate authentication system with a prerequisite that candidates had to allow for sharing their screen, video and audio, following which:

• First, the webcam asked the candidates to click their photo – Pic 1
• They also had to show a valid ID proof to the camera – Pic 2
• Third, a quick authentication via OTP further confirmed their candidature – Pic 3

2. Video proctoring:

Chordify did not want to involve its hiring managers in proctoring. However, it wanted to conduct reliable assessments remotely, by leveraging proctoring as a solution. Hence, the Mercer | Mettl team initiated record and review proctoring on its coding assessment platform.

• Record and review proctoring did not require continual invigilation. The session’s video was recorded and updated on the cloud that could be viewed at any time
• The Chordify team did not have to supervise the candidates in real-time. Instead, it reviewed every recorded session diligently at its convenience
• The automated process saved the hiring management considerable time and effort

3. Mettl Secure Browser (MSB):

Mettl Secure Browser (MSB), specifically designed to provide secure navigation control during test-taking, was also leveraged on the coding assessment platform for Chordify. MSB, a focused full-screen browser window, didn’t allow for minimization of the assessment screen or any interaction with other screens.

The feature:

• Eliminated candidates’ ability to cheat by creating a highly secure and controlled environment online
• It restricted all right-click menu options, function keys, keyboard shortcuts, copying and pasting or taking screenshots
• It did not allow test-takers to move out of the application before finishing the test
• It also restricted candidates from opening any unauthorized website or accessing any blacklisted software/third-party applications
• MSB also shut down all active applications, such as other browsers and cheating tools
• The use of any cable, hard drive, or external devices such as USB and internet dongle was also barred by integrating the MSB

Mercer| Mettl’s combination of coding assessments and Mettl I/O provided the following solutions:

1. Learning and development:

Chordify wanted granular insights into applicants’ strengths, weaknesses, skills gaps and growth opportunities relevant to their success as a technical professional. Hence, by utilizing the coding assessment platform and Mettl I/O, hiring managers at Chordify:

• Acquired relevant and accurate information about a candidate’s knowledge, application and work-related character
• The opportunity helped Chordify ascertain the candidates best suited for the role, internally and externally
• The results also provided an accurate assessment of the areas of improvement.
• Chordify could chart a training program to help candidates improve their skills or learn new ones. They were reasonable and relevant to their positions
• Resourceful and timely L&D added a layer of qualification by building relevant skills and making them compelling fit for job roles

2. Fully auto-grading support:

Chordify wanted to bolster its hiring decision and substantiate hiring suggestions for external projects based on authentic score reports. It understood that the validated scores showcasing the candidates’ ability and compatibility, in tandem with the job requirement, would uphold their selection. Hence, Chordify could evaluate candidates in detail, using the custom scoring logic for both assessment and simulation tests.

• Based on the MCQ results, Chordify could eliminate innumerable unsuitable candidates who didn’t have the required knowledge or aptitude
• Auto-graded I/O instantaneously evaluated the candidates on several parameters such as code correctness, difficulty level, time and space complexities, and other such vital parameters
• The accurate test report offered in-depth analytics of code and programming standards, enabling the hiring managers at Chordify to predict the real-life skills of their candidates at scale
• The assessments validation reduced the manual and cumbersome effort undertaken by the hiring managers in shortlisting potential candidates
• They could confidently communicate validated results to the clients during external shortlisting of the candidates
• Chordify could enhance productivity and improve operations by eliminating manual intervention
• A thorough evaluation of coding potential was free from hiring bias and backed the hiring manager’s decision with optimum reliability and validity of a coder’s true potential.
• The company could eliminate any decision by the interview panel based on their intuition or bias
• The real-time auto-grading acted as the second filter for technical screening interviews -  management and interview panels did not have to undertake time-consuming interviews

3. Shorter decision-making cycle:

Instead of taking days or months to culminate a hiring process that often impaired hiring efficiency, Mercer | Mettl solutions:

• Provided instant assessment evaluation over a tremendous scope of the content
• Enabled quicker and better-informed decisions
• Ensured a swift and precise impression of the candidates
• Eliminated tedious tasks, freeing the hiring managers to focus on higher-value work

• Chordify digitized its entire technical assessment process, without compromising the candidate’s experience
• Automated grading scaled the organization’s selection capacity, improving operations and saving substantial time and financial resources
• The submitted to hire ratio at Chordify outdid many similar organizations 
• The number of consultant resumes received by the clients reduced to two from double digits, with an uptick in quality. Chordify also witnessed that both shortlisted individuals were often engaged in the same project owing to their proficient capability
• The L&D department leveraged the detailed reports to gauge a deep and focussed understanding of the applicants’ specific traits for tailored training
• Chordify could eliminate bias and undue favors in their subsequent hiring processes owing to the validated results of a candidate’s potential
• After a successful and bias-free hiring drive at Chordify, the management extended the use of Mercer | Mettl’s platform for skill assessment, proctoring and Mettl I/O for its Intulog – its other company