CodeSignal, a firm that uses automated technical assessments to help recruiters at companies like Facebook, Uber, and Zoom vet software development prospects, has raised $50 million in a series C round of funding.
Along with the funding, CodeSignal revealed a new “advanced” integrated code environment (IDE) that allows candidates to engage with all of the various aspects in a “persistent, fully adjustable environment,” similar to coding on a local workstation.
The company’s expansion comes at a key juncture in the IT recruiting industry. When combined with cross-industry digital transformation efforts (every company is becoming a software company) and the increasing shift toward remote work, companies are under more pressure to not only find suitable applicants but also to properly assess them online. This is when CodeSignal enters the picture.
CodeSignal, which was founded in 2015 as CodeFights before rebranding three years later, provides the technological know-how to assist enterprises to automate coding examinations and assessments at scale. Furthermore, by following a uniform interview framework that applies the same objective standards to all candidates, it helps reduce prejudice in the hiring process.
According to CodeSignal CEO Tigran Sloyan, there are so many difficulties linked to developer hiring that we assist solve for our customers by structuring, automating, and scaling developer interviews. It includes everything from minimizing bias and improving diversity in hiring to saving time in recruiting and engineering. But, if I had to pick just one issue, I’d say we assist organizations in becoming more data-driven in their recruiting decisions.
Understanding the software developer recruitment environment helps understand the challenge that CodeSignal is attempting to solve. For a single engineering position, a company may receive hundreds of applications. It takes a lot of time and effort to narrow down all of these submissions to a manageable selection of the best applicants. A brief review of a résumé to identify what institution an applicant attended could be part of the prescreening process, putting the recruiter’s own biases and views into the mix.
Companies that incorporate CodeSignal into their recruitment process can automatically send applicants personalized exams and assessments to determine which candidates are the greatest software engineers, with the results being sent directly to the hiring business. All applicants are given a “coding score” by CodeSignal, which shows how well they fared in comparison to an industry standard.
While this score isn’t meant to determine who moves on to the next round, it does help shorten the time it takes to analyze applicants earlier in the process and eliminate any biases. Recruiters can then switch to CodeSignal Interview, which offers a collaborative IDE that will be familiar to anyone who has used Visual Studio Code, after choosing a more manageable cohort of prospects. Interviewers can work hand-in-hand with candidates, observing their problem-solving processes in real-time and assessing how well they would fit into the organization, thanks to the inclusion of live video chat.
Since its founding, CodeSignal has raised approximately $90 million in funding, including a $25 million tranche last December. The San Francisco-based startup is now well-funded to take advantage of the growing need for remote recruitment tools designed exclusively for software developers. Since its recent round of funding, CodeSignal has announced a plethora of previously unnamed customers, including Netflix, Facebook, Roblox, Capital One, Liberty Mutual, and the Royal Bank of Canada, highlighting the demand for remote recruitment tools across industries. With demand increasing, CodeSignal has had to increase its own recruitment efforts, tripling its staff size in the last ten months and doubling down on its integrations with many of the most common tools used by recruiters. Sloyan went on to say that they’ve been deeply ingrained in the HR Tech ecosystem, with integration and relationships with the majority of major ATS, HRIS, and CRM suppliers.
Index Ventures led CodeSignal’s series C financing, which also included Menlo Ventures, Headline, and A Capital.
