A Big Year for Hired: Launching Hired Advanced with Teamwork

It’s been a really exciting year for Hired. As VP of Product, I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish as a team in a few short months. We launched 3 new subscription products, we acquired Py, a technical assessments platform, now known as Hired Assessments, and we integrated their team. Today we’re launching Hired Advanced and combining much of this technology into one platform. With Hired Advanced, recruiters can hire from a continuous pipeline of top tech talent and access programming skills assessments results right at the top of the hiring funnel as they source, saving time in their recruiting process. 

Through our early research with Beta customers, we found that one thing they really love about Hired Advanced is how it helps them collaborate more effectively on hiring with their cross-functional teams. This strikes a chord with me especially because it took such teamwork to create this solution across our Product, Design, and Engineering teams – the same type of talent our clients are trying to attract by using what we’ve built. When you are part of a mission-driven culture as we are at Hired, striving to find everyone a job they love, you know that hiring the right people is key to company success. We’re excited to be offering companies a new way to work together to quickly hire top tech talent to further their own missions.

Hired Advanced: Unlimited hiring and technical assessments in one platform

What makes Hired Advanced so impactful? First and foremost is Assessments-Enriched Profiles, which we expect will be a true game changer for recruiters and hiring managers alike. Most recruiters don’t have the same technical acumen that engineering hiring managers have, so it’s often challenging for them to evaluate the technical capabilities of candidates on their own based only on what a candidate reports about their skills. While technical assessments are typically administered later on in the process after sourcing, now recruiters can see right up front if a candidate has basic programming skills and they can pass candidates along to hiring managers with confidence, improving collaboration all around.

Here’s how it works: Hired software engineering candidates, who apply to be on Hired, can opt to take a Programming Skills Assessment. Once candidates have taken and passed the technical assessment, they receive a badge on their Hired profile. For example, a candidate might choose to take the assessment in a particular language, like Python. A recruiter can then see this immediate signal of their proficiency and can validate that the candidate has the skills they say they do. Hiring managers can then drill down to see their score, how they wrote their code, and even view a real-time playback of their progress to see how they came to their solution – helping them better frame an interview conversation. 

Assessing candidate programming skills early on in the hiring process has several benefits:

• The Hired talent pool is already curated and incredibly qualified, but now recruiters can quickly validate what candidates say they can do on the technical front.
• It accelerates the technical screening and hiring process and expands a recruiter’s reach to candidates they might not have initially flagged before. 
• We don’t require employers to change their process. We provide flexibility; companies can choose to still have a phone screen, shorten it, or focus it on the results of the programming skills assessment.
• Assessments also help establish candidate intent. Hired candidates already have high intent for a new job and this shows in our high candidate response rates of 90%. We’ve seen that candidates who’ve taken the assessment are even more likely to respond and accept an interview.
• They are an unbiased way to evaluate a candidate’s technical ability, which also contributes to diversity hiring efforts. By using an unproctored test, employers can feel confident that unconscious bias of an interviewer has not seeped into the process. 
• They help recruiters and hiring managers collaborate better because the process is structured along agreed-upon parameters. 
• It can reduce the time required by precious engineering resources in the recruiting process.

It’s a game changer for candidates too. It helps them stand out in a highly competitive space, shows that they are actively pursuing a new job and can speed up the hiring process on their end. Data from our beta test has shown that candidates who have taken the test are getting placed with more frequency than other candidates. At Hired, we’ve always had a candidate focus, and now we’re bringing the candidate experience to a new level.

See beyond salary with Total Offer Advantage

We all know that candidates today are looking for more than just a base salary, and that’s the purpose of Total Offer Advantage. It helps employers better express comp details, such as stock, time off, bonuses and other key items that will help position their roles competitively and get top talent on board. We know from our Brand Health Report that 62% of candidates would be more likely to engage with a recruiter if they see salary up front. We also know that 55% of tech workers believe that compensation and benefits are most important to them when searching for a new job. Candidates look at more than just salary when deciding on an offer. When you have a diverse offer, sharing it early is a great way to put your best foot forward and increase your interview acceptance rates. Offers are non binding, and both candidates and employers are free to negotiate later in the process.

Team Insights improve collaboration

With Hired Advanced, we’ve added a number of key reports and insights to ensure that teams are evaluating their overall performance and checking that they are also effectively collaborating. Team Insights reporting provides a snapshot on recruiting team performance, showing who’s most successful, how much time they are spending sourcing, the number of interview requests sent, acceptance rates, response times, and other metrics. You can also compare up to three users side by side, to identify top performers and share best practices (such as seeing how rejection reasons vary by recruiter, allowing them to adjust their messaging). The goal is to enhance collaboration among hiring teams, since we know that collaboration results in more closed candidates.

Salary Bias Alerts drive wage equality goals

At Hired, we’ve always been dedicated to diversity and inclusion hiring. We know from our Wage Inequality in the Workplace report that 60% of the time, men are offered higher salaries than women. And sometimes it isn’t just the hiring company that’s biased: six in ten women themselves put in a lower desired salary amount than is normal for that role. Now with our Salary Bias Alert, when a user puts in a salary that is below (or above) what they’ve offered that role in the past, an alert will appear. The alert is triggered even if the offer matches what the candidate asked for, and the user will have the opportunity to update their offer before it’s sent to the candidate. We’ve seen several hundreds of thousands of dollars in revisions just during our beta period. Our goal is to set a direction for the industry to reduce unconscious bias in recruiting , and do it in an immediately actionable way. 

I’m personally thrilled at what our own team has accomplished by collaborating in such little time. We’re happy to be bringing these important features to our customers. While customers can already make unlimited hires from our predictable pipeline of top talent, these new features will help them be even more resourceful, collaborative and equitable in their hiring. 

We’re offering a free 4-week preview of Hired Advanced to our subscription customers starting July 11th. Visit hired.com/advanced to learn more and sign up for a demo today.