The company
A better way to connect & learn together
Sparkwise radically scales engaging live group learning that sticks – by letting everyone connect, practice, and master skills together in AI-enabled small groups.
The challenge
Finding qualified talent abroad is complex and time-consuming
As an early-stage company, Sparkwise is focused on building a world-class remote team regardless of where people live, because great talent can be found everywhere. To accomplish this, they decided to hire software engineers from Latin America due to the region’s strong talent and compatible time zones.
For previous hires, Sparkwise found it significantly time consuming and challenging to find talent abroad. In-region recruiting solutions turned out to be unreliable, and after taking on the task in-house, the team spent over 100 hours on sourcing and screening. With this experience in mind, the team was looking for a faster and more reliable solution.
The solution
International technical recruiting on autopilot
Thanks to Scout, Sparkwise was able to put their international recruiting effort on autopilot, all while providing candidates with valuable interview feedback and an enjoyable experience, and leveraging Scout real-world assessments and industry-standard benchmarking.
Scout’s assessments include an open-ended engineering project tailored to the role, which candidates complete via an individual GitHub repo and pull requests to match on-the-job expectations. The assessment also includes async video questions to gauge the candidate’s behavioral skills using scenarios specific to the company.
Using Scout allowed Sparkwise’s engineering team to save 25+ hours per week on sourcing and screening, and also extended their top-of-funnel to reach more candidates across all of Latin America. Sparkwise used Scout's candidate dashboard to thoroughly review each candidate’s assessment results upfront, which included the code solution and behavioral question responses. This means that by the time the team met with a prospective candidate, they were able to trust that the candidate was thoroughly pre-vetted for the role’s unique requirements.
The results
5x faster time to hire with 100+ hours saved
Four weeks after onboarding to Scout, Sparkwise had a signed offer in hand from a candidate that the team was super excited about. Overall, the team made a hire 5x faster and saved over 100 manual hours compared to their previous international hire.
Timeline snapshot:
- May 27th: Onboarded to Scout
- June 6th: Received first wave of recommended candidates
- June 13th: Interviewed first candidate
- June 14th: Shared feedback to refine candidate screening
- June 28th: Extended offer
- June 28th: Offer accepted
"With Scout, our candidate search process felt like it was on autopilot. We were able to cast a wider net to reach more candidates internationally, and we worked with Scout to calibrate a sourcing and screening process that let us then focus entirely on the most promising candidates. In a month, we extended an offer to a talented engineer who our team is excited to bring onboard. We’ll continue to partner with Scout for our future hires, and would strongly recommend them to other engineering leaders who want to focus their time and energy on the most impactful parts of the hiring process."
-Ari, CTO @ Sparkwise