Data-driven technical recruitment platform CodeSignal raises $50M

CodeSignal, a company that helps recruiters at companies such as Facebook, Uber, and Zoom screen software development candidates using automated technical assessments, has raised $50 million in a series C round of funding.

Alongside the funding, CodeSignal also announced a new “advanced” integrated code environment (IDE) that offers candidates a “similar experience to coding on a local machine,” allowing them to interact with all the various elements in a “persistent, fully configurable environment.”

Data-driven hiring

The company’s raise comes at a critical time for the tech recruitment sphere. A Gartner study released this week suggested that the IT talent gap is continuing to grow, representing a major barrier to adoption for emerging technologies. Combined with cross-industry digital transformation efforts (every company is a software company now) and the rapid push toward remote work, this puts more pressure on companies not only to identify qualified candidates, but to properly assess them virtually. That is where CodeSignal comes into play.

Founded in 2015 as CodeFights before rebranding three years later, CodeSignal serves the technological smarts to help companies conduct coding tests and assessments at scale through automation. Moreover, it can also mitigate bias in the hiring process through adhering to a consistent interview structure that applies the same objective standards to all candidates.

“There are so many problems related to developer hiring that we help solve for our customers through structuring, automating, and scaling developer interviews,” CodeSignal CEO Tigran Sloyan told VentureBeat. “It ranges from saving recruiting time, to saving engineering time to reducing bias and increasing diversity in hiring. But if I had to name just one problem, I’d generalize all of these to say we help companies become more data-driven in their hiring decisions.”

Prescreening

To understand the problem that CodeSignal is setting out to solve, it helps to understand the software development recruitment landscape. Organizations might receive thousands of applications for a single engineering role. Whittling these applications down to a manageable shortlist of the most suitable candidates is a resource-intensive endeavor. The prescreening process alone might involve a quick skim-read of a resume to see what university the applicant attended, thus introducing the recruiter’s own biases and perceptions to the mix.

With CodeSignal integrated into the recruitment process, companies can automatically send applicants customized tests and assessments to find which are the best software engineers, with the resulting data issued directly to the hiring company. CodeSignal also allocates a “coding score” for all applicants to highlight how each candidate performed against an industry benchmark.

While this score isn’t designed to be the deciding factor in who progresses to the next stage, it helps reduce the time required to assess candidates earlier in the process and remove any inherent biases.

After identifying a more manageable cohort of candidates, recruiters can then turn to CodeSignal Interview, which offers a collaborative IDE that will be familiar to anyone that has used Visual Studio Code. With live video chat baked in, interviewers can work hand-in-hand with candidates and observe their problem-solving processes in real time and assess how well they might fit into the organization.

CodeSignal has now raised nearly $90 million in funding since its inception, including a $25 million tranche last December. With its latest cash injection, the San Francisco-based company is well-financed to capitalize on the growing demand for remote recruitment tools built specifically for software developers.

Since its last funding round, CodeSignal has also revealed a slew of previously undisclosed customers including Netflix, Facebook, Roblox, Capital One, Liberty Mutual, and Royal Bank of Canada, which helps to highlight the demand for remote recruitment tools across industries. With demand skyrocketing, CodeSignal has had to ramp up its own recruitment drive, tripling its team size in the past 10 months, while it has doubled down on its integrations with many of the common tools that recruiters use.

“We’ve become very closely integrated with the overall HR Tech ecosystem, adding integration and partnerships with most major ATS, HRIS, and CRM providers,” Sloyan said.

CodeSignal’s series C round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, Headline, and A Capital.