HireVue has announced the release of a new add-on module for its HireVue Digital Interview Platform. CodeVue is intended to improve the way organizations identify, screen and assess technical or developer positions. Potentially it will benefit companies that need to fill large numbers of technical positions that involve writing code, helping to automate a recruiting process that has been manual and inefficient.
HireVue Digital Interview Platform expands on the applicant tracking capabilities of most recruiting products by using webcams to facilitate recording of interviews with candidates, which can help hiring managers and recruiters get a feel for the person behind the resume without incurring travel expenses. Recently HireVue has been expanding its platform with other new capabilities. Two key advances include a mobile application, recognized by HR Executive Magazine as a Top HR Product of 2012 that let users share and view interviews from most common mobile devices and social tools with which users comment and rate interviews of potential candidates which I would agree is changing the hiring processes significantly. With such improvements HireVue is becoming established as an innovator in the recruiting market.
In 2011 my colleague Mark Smith assessed HireVue as an expanding company with its digital and mobile interviewing capabilities. Last November it continued to expand by acquiring San Francisco-based CodeEval; its technology forms the core of CodeVue. This acquisition gives HireVue several unique capabilities that should help differentiate it in an increasingly crowded market of recruiting and human capital management software vendors.
The recruiting market has been focusing more on metrics, such as quality of hire, cultural fit and hiring manager satisfaction, that can satisfy the need for more sophisticated screening. For technical positions this need is more acute, as failure to hire good candidates can undermine the quality of a company’s products. Our benchmark research on social media in recruiting supports this focus on quality of hire: 88% of participating organizations said it matters most to them. Cost per hire was also among the most popular metrics reported; 49% said they track it. This combination of preferences validates the direction that HireVue has taken by offering an automation screening tool that will focus on technical hires.
The business problem CodeVue addresses is screening the actual skills of technical applicants by testing them with coding or technical challenges. The module provides automated coding challenges in 13 languages and includes a library of more than 60 prebuilt code challenges; users also can design their own. CodeVue also offers tools to help hiring managers assess the results of the challenges, including enforcing time limits, automatically scoring responses for all predetermined test cases, reviewing raw executed code and integrating with collaboration tools to allow sharing with team members in other locations.
Bringing candidates on-site and having the company’s most experienced developers review their responses to coding challenges is an expensive process that does not scale well when many positions must be filled. By automating the technical and coding challenges, CodeVue lets customers simplify this part of the candidate screening process, has the potential to save significant amounts of time and money and can handle volumes of applicants much more effectively. Used effectively it could improve the success ratio of hiring and free highly paid staff from doing initial screening. For large companies that hire across many locations, the cost savings could be substantial.
For companies in the software industry, consulting firms, outsourcers and others that rely on technical talent, HireVue can help improve the efficiency of their hiring process. CIOs and CTOs should work with their recruiting teams to get the full potential out of tools like this; doing so will enable them to gain confidence in their hires, especially as developer teams become more virtual and further spread geographically.
Regards,
Stephan Millard
VP & Research Director