From 40 to 1096 candidate assessments: Trell’s transition to data-driven automated tech hiring
By: Saman Kapur
Tags: Startup, Hiring Tips, Recruitment, Technews, Hrtech

Trell is turning over a new leaf with the wave of digitization sweeping across the nation. Following the TikTok ban, Trell rapidly scaled to close to 10 billion views on their app overnight. Backed by VC giant- Sequoia, they realised the emerging need to scale up their engineering team to filter candidates at an exponentially larger scale. Their mission lies in building India’s largest lifestyle-community-commerce platform for the next 500 million internet users. Over 75 million users create around 5 million visual and textual blogs that get over 10 billion views on their app.

Trell’s engaging conversations and an ever-growing community is backed through technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, which also yield actionable insights for content creators up their game and emerge as influential storytellers.

The Challenge:

With the spike in visibility, while Trell got thousands of app downloads, their challenge lied in meeting aggressive hiring goals at the same time ensuring the quality of engineers. Hiring at scale with the limited engineering time along with matching product cycle was a challenge in Trell’s recruiting roadmap. Besides this, they also wanted to ensure they are able to keep their developer's time to build the products, i.e free from interviewing and assessing candidates. Previously, Trell relied on on-site tech interviews making the process heavily dependent on their senior developer’s time.

The Codejudge Trell Solution:

With the Trell and Codejudge collaboration, we had one goal in mind: to meet their hiring velocity while ensuring the quality of candidates should be consistently high. What was also needed was a complete remodelling of their hiring approach. Here’s how we re-modelled an automated hiring process:

Hiring for SDE 2s and SDE 3s ( Senior Developer Pipeline )

In order to match the work needed to ramp up their product cycle, Trell needed developers who could start delivering on day 1 of joining. This meant, that their hiring process should be robust enough to capture the on-the-job skills of the developer and at the same time be time-efficient.

The Trell and Codejudge partnership enabled assessments that were based on real-world projects helping them to gauge real technical skills and a developer’s ability to build scalable solutions accurately and efficiently.

They built their custom tests within seconds and deployed them to candidates at scale. With these assessments, Trell was able to capture functionality and code quality data points faster than ever. With Codejudge’s data-driven skill reports, they were able to filter 11 qualified candidates out of 128 applications in just 19 days.

-Hiring for SDE1 (Fresher Pipeline)

Trell’s fresh hiring needed campus visits to eight colleges with over 700 candidates who had to be assessed within a time period of 3 weeks. With Codejudge’s library of pre-built tests and technical support team, Trell was able to generate multiple types of assessments within a few clicks. Further, these tests were deployed at scale across campuses resulting in Trell vetting 796 fresher candidates in just 7 days. With this, Trell brought 50 candidates to the next round of assessments within a week and hired 12 developers.

The Result:

Before Codejudge, Trell’s hiring for each senior role would take over two months. The automated and data-driven assessments enabled this number to be reduced to a total of 2 months to close all 24 positions while at the same time accelerating candidate accuracy by 6x. As a result, Trell saved over 1000+ in candidate interviews and Codejudge reduced their hiring costs by 4x.

If you have any questions about how we can help you accelerate your tech hiring or how to get started, get in touch with us at info@codejudge.io or book a free demo.