HireVue today announced its acquisition of CodeEval, a platform technical evaluations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but HireVue founder Mark Newman confirms that the CodeEval team is joining HireVue to continue developing the CodeEval product. No acqui-hire here.
CodeEval was founded by a guy named Jimmy John, who I’m pretty sure is not the sandwich guy, and was part of the i/o Ventures incubation program. It provides a service for offering various programming challenges that recruiters can then use to screen applicants. The idea is to move the white board questions from an interview to the very beginning of the process, so that people who don’t pass don’t make it to the interview stage.
When we covered the company last year commenters had mixed opinions. From my experience developers have never been fond of writing code in interviews, so it’s not surprising. The service benefits recruiters more than it does programmers, which in a hot job market could be a problem. As one commenter wrote: “Developers have nothing to gain from this platform: they’re not the desperate ones here. Why should I, as a developer do dozens of tests for each job application?”
To appeal to developers then CodeEval needs to make it possible for developers to apply or lots of jobs by answering the same few questions. Some of the companies using the service so far include BitTorrent, RapLeaf and Warner Brothers.
“Screening job candidates is a critical part of matching people to jobs, and tools like CodeEval can make technical screening much simpler and faster while at the same time making it a more enjoyable experience for the candidate,” says Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies, the original developer of the open source Puppet application. Kanies says is interested in the idea but hasn’t used the product himself.
It seems like a good fit for HireVue, which sells a platform for hiring managers to manage job interviews and for doing job interview remotely. Its product, Digital Interview Platform, is used by companies like Nike and Starbucks to time shift interviews. Candidates ask questions on a web cam within a certain allotted amount of time so that they can’t “redo” and polish answers, and then managers can watch the videos on their own time, reducing the amount of scheduling needed to conduct an initial interview.
I think the appeal of this stuff to recruiters and hiring managers is self-evident. But how about it job seekers – what do you think?