Karat blog

Hiring software engineers is notoriously challenging. Whether it’s a lack of time to conduct technical assessments, inability to find the right candidates in the first place, or lack of reliability in the recommendations — it’s hard to find an approach that works. Most technical hiring processes start first-round technical assessment: Code tests Take-home technical assessment […]

Will your team ever go back to the office? For many, the answer is “no.” This seismic shift means many business processes must go completely virtual, including interviewing and hiring software engineers. Karat has conducted over 100k technical interviews — all remotely — and established the following best practices on how to conduct remote technical […]

It’s not uncommon for us to start working with a new client and discover that onsite-to-offer ratios are in the 5:1, 10:1, or even 15:1 range. For engineering teams, high onsite-to-offer ratios represent a massive tax. Having a 10:1 ratio means that for every new hire, you’re conducting 10 onsite interview loops, each with somewhere […]

In March 2019, Ethos Life was rapidly hiring engineers to accelerate an ambitious product development roadmap. The goal was to deploy new predictive analytics and data technologies to break down the barriers keeping people from getting life insurance coverage. “Ethos is a modern solution for life insurance and we’re leveraging advanced technologies such as machine […]

Diversity, engineering, and talent leaders from Karat, Databricks, and Lowe’s share their core University Recruiting and inclusive interviewing tips for building diverse engineering teams The approach most companies use to hire software engineers is broken. At Karat, we’ve been helping organizations hire the best engineers for their teams for years. But one of the most […]

Last month, we explored some of the perils of automated code tests. The data shows that reliance on absolute completeness and correctness not only blocks great engineers from getting job offers, but it does so in a way that disproportionately harms underrepresented minorities and women. This should be a red flag for every organization that […]

Last month we shared a number of programs as part of our commitment to Black software engineers. One of these initiatives is to use our interview data and research to develop new formats that reduce bias. Today’s research shows that the emphasis code tests place on absolute completeness and correctness is failing to produce a […]

A few weeks ago we connected with Claus Moberg, Roblox’s VP of Engineering, to get his thoughts on the state of hiring software engineers. One theme that came up is the impact of false positives. He noted that live first-round technical interviews showed “…a dramatic improvement over [code tests] and our own emailed questions. Without […]

By, Adam Dangoor As a candidate, some of the least enjoyable interview experiences I have had are those after which I felt that I did not get across what I could bring to the team. The interviewer didn’t walk away knowing what I could do, only what I could not do. Software engineering is such […]