How AvidXchange Achieved a 95% Offer Acceptance Rate

AvidXchange’s interview process was too long and inconsistent, causing them to lose candidates. Without any standards for interview questions, interviewers asked different questions and the Talent Acquisition team didn’t know what interviewers were asking candidates. Additionally, every interview involved two technical engineers. Since AvidXchange was aiming to hire 80 to 100 engineers a year, interviewing took up a lot of engineers’ time and resulted in interview fatigue. During this time, the company’s offer acceptance rate plummeted to around 65%. 

Solution

AvidXchange explored potential solutions to improve their interview process. They considered online quizzes but felt that quizzes were prone to cheating. Instead, they turned to Karat for several reasons:

• With about 80% of AvidXchange’s employees on the East Coast, “we were losing out days at a time trying to schedule folks all across the country,” said Jimmy Goose, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at AvidXchange. Karat offers the ability to schedule interviews 24/7, including after normal business hours and on weekends, so that candidates can interview at their earliest convenience. 
• Karat provides customers with data on their candidates and hiring funnel. This data allows AvidXchange to see how their recruiters are doing from week to week and continually optimize their hiring process. 
• AvidXchange liked Karat’s hands-on approach. This was particularly important at the beginning of their partnership, when AvidXchange was calibrating its hiring bar. Karat helped the organization make sure they were holding themselves to the right hiring bar and passing enough candidates through. 
• Karat interviews are video recorded, which allows hiring managers to go back and review the questions asked. 

Results

By having Karat conduct technical screenings, it not only saved AvidXchange engineering time, but it was also “like laying the foundation of what we want in our engineers,” said Goose. “Going into the actual technical interview that we have take place after that Karat screening, our engineers don’t have to worry [about] does this guy have the basic foundation of coding. They can go right into the meat of the matter, which is what our engineers need by team.” 

Being the first company to make a candidate an offer can make a big difference. The faster you can interview a candidate, the faster they’ll move through the entire process. For AvidXchange, it only takes 3.3 days on average for candidates to move from invitation to interview, while it takes an average of five days across Karat customers and 12 days in the U.S. AvidXchange’s speed is mostly driven by the fact that candidates can schedule same-day and off-hour interviews due to Karat’s 24/7 on-demand interview scheduling and team of over 500 Interview Engineers located around the world.

Aside from creating a better candidate experience, a speedy hiring process correlates with candidate quality. Goose said, “People that are great on the market won’t last very long, and people appreciate a speedy process.” He feels proud of their time to hire, which is currently 35 days for engineers. Prior to using Karat, it took 60 to 90 days depending on the year. “A lot of it has to do with the flexibility of being able to get people through Karat.”

By making these changes with Karat’s innovative solution that combines humans and technology, AvidXchange has seen their offer acceptance rate go from 65% to 95%. Such a large increase has really boosted their confidence in hiring the right people. Before Karat, 7% to 10% of their budget was being spent on staffing firms in order to solve this problem. Now, less than 1% of their hires are coming from staffing firms, and these are for extremely niche positions. “That’s just a huge win and a huge return on our ROI. And knowing that we’re not only increasing our speed, but also our quality like all at the same time, we went from losing to winning,” said Goose. 

Learn more about how AvidXchange has made their hiring process for engineers more efficient and increased hiring quality while still delighting candidates in our “Radically Improve Engineer Offer Acceptance Rates” webinar.