Atlassian’s Data-Driven Approach Improves Candidate Experience

When companies are rapidly growing, they prioritize hiring speed and volume, but it’s often at the expense of candidate quality and the candidate experience. Atlassian found itself in this situation when it needed to quickly grow its engineering teams. As a global company that cares about providing a positive, fair experience to every candidate and recognizes that candidates they pass on may end up being the right fit in the future, Atlassian needed to balance volume, quality, and experience.

Using Karat’s end-to-end solution for technical hiring, Atlassian was able to measure their candidate experience and confirm whether the changes they made to increase hiring efficiency were also adding to — not detracting from — the candidate experience. 

Supporting Candidates With Flexible, More Equitable Interviews   

Karat provides a number of tools that help companies improve the quality, efficiency, and equity of their technical hiring process. Atlassian leveraged Karat’s 24/7 interview scheduling, which gives candidates the flexibility to interview the same day, in the evening, and even on weekends with more than 500 trained and vetted Karat Interview Engineers around the world. With more flexible scheduling, candidates can move at the speed they want and are more likely to follow through to the next stage. 

Atlassian also implemented Karat’s Redo interviews, which give candidates the opportunity to redo their first-round technical interview if they feel they didn’t do their best. This improves the candidate experience, increases hiring yield, and supports underrepresented minorities who may not have as much interview experience as their counterparts.  

Measuring the Impact on Candidate Experience

Using Karat data, Atlassian has been able to see the effect of these changes on the candidate experience. While a variety of candidates have chosen to take a Redo interview, candidates who self-identified as an underrepresented minority and completed a Redo, in particular, go on to complete all the interview stages and successfully receive an offer.

In addition to Redo interview data, Karat provides Atlassian with other data on underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (URGs), such as how they’re performing and when they schedule interviews. This allows Atlassian to identify opportunities to not only better support these groups, but to also provide that same support to any candidate who interviews with the company.  

Using Data to Inform the Rest of the Hiring Process

For Hannah Brown, Strategic Program Manager, Talent Acquisition at Atlassian, the data that Karat provides is one of her favorite aspects of the product “because particularly in my role, being able to make decisions or move things forward, it’s always a data-led approach.” Brown explained that Karat’s data doesn’t only provide them with a good understanding of how the Karat interview process is going, but it also gives Atlassian more insight into their talent bar, global consistency, and onsite opportunities. 

Atlassian is extrapolating learnings from Karat data to the entire hiring funnel. These insights may be able to help improve their onsite interviews and hiring for non-engineering roles. For example, Atlassian is testing if the success they’ve seen with implementing 24/7 interview scheduling for software engineers can also be achieved with the rest of their global interviewing pool. 

By leveraging Karat’s team of experts in analytics, interview content, and engineering, Brown has been able to test out hypotheses and answer questions like “What’s the best ROI for candidates to return into the process based on their second interview result?” The close partnership between the two organizations has also enabled Atlassian to dive deep into their URG data and create a regular cadence of monitoring progress, identifying areas of improvement, and iterating. 

Hear more about how Atlassian’s partnership with Karat improved their candidate experience, as well as hiring efficiency, in our Elevating Global Engineering Hiring: How Atlassian and Karat Boosted Quality, Efficiency, and Equity webinar.