Customer Story
How Figma Built the Engineering Team Behind its IPO
Discover how Figma redefined its technical hiring to evaluating real-world skills, build stronger, more innovative engineering teams, and cut time-to-hire by 10 days.
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Generating a Stronger Signal on Top Talent
Assessing Real-World Engineering Skills
Karat's Impact to Early Career Hiring
How Did Early-Career Hiring Strengthen Figma’s IPO Journey?
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Figma didn’t just set out to build a design tool – it set out to redefine how teams create together. As the company expanded, it became clear that building world-class products required building a world-class engineering team. To accomplish this, Figma needed to treat early-career hiring as a strategic investment in long-term innovation.
How Did Figma Generate a Stronger Signal on Top Talent?
Figma’s existing hiring methods made it difficult to generate a predictive signal on talent without overwhelming internal teams. Resume screens overlooked promising talent, generic coding tests failed to assess real-world engineering ability, and its onsite technical loops required significant investments of time and resources from engineering and recruiting teams.
To maintain its high bar while reaching more candidates, Figma needed a smarter, fairer, and scalable way to evaluate early-career engineers.
See how Karat helps companies like Figma streamline early-career hiring – Request a demo.
How Did Karat Help Figma Assess Real-World Engineering Skills?
To meet these goals, Figma partnered with Karat to integrate Byteboard into its data-driven hiring process. A project-based interview aligned with real-world engineering work, Byteboard measured practical skills such as collaboration, problem-solving, and systems thinking, giving hiring managers an accurate measure of a candidate’s ability and job readiness. The structured approach and skills-based content provided consistent, high-quality data for making strong hiring decisions.
“The technical evaluation process is rooted in real world technical challenges and gives candidates the ability to show off their abilities across several dimensions. We could finally streamline our 2020 hiring by having candidates pass through the Byteboard evaluation before bringing them onsite.”
Thomas Wright, Engineering Manager
What Impact Did Karat Have on Figma’s Early-Career Hiring?
By investing in its early-career technical hiring, Figma built a class of engineers ready to contribute and succeed from day one, while simultaneously improving process efficiency and candidate experience.
Time to hire dropped by 10 days, streamlining coordination and offer cycles. With a predictive signal from the project-based interview, Figma was able to identify and hire stronger engineers with skills aligned to real-world tasks. The asynchronous format also allowed candidates to complete the evaluation on their own time, freeing up engineers and removing the burden of live coordination.
“Using Karat’s Byteboard inclusive technical assessment for this recruiting season was monumental in our success in hiring a class of interns and recent graduates from more universities and backgrounds than all previous hiring seasons, along with increasing pass-through rates and decreasing our time to hire.”
Kristen Dauler, University Programs Manager
How Did Early-Career Hiring Strengthen Figma’s IPO Journey?
By partnering with Karat, Figma gave engineering leaders the tools to evaluate talent based on real-world ability with speed and precision. This strategy didn’t just fill roles faster; it laid the groundwork for stronger teams, better products, and sustained innovation.
Today, as Figma moves into its next chapter as a public company, that foundation remains intact. With Karat as a partner, Figma has the infrastructure to continue hiring with the same technical excellence that fuels every new feature.