A few months ago, iMocha itself was looking to fill a coding position. The company decided to use this as an opportunity to test out their product. And 24-year-old Nikhare was the first candidate to be evaluated.
Live Coding Platform enabled Nikhare and the panel of interviewers to conduct the whiteboard round from the safety of their homes. Nikhare could choose between 16 coding languages, which are offered via a drop-down menu in the coding environment.
“I found the Live Coding Platform easy to use, which took some pressure off during the interview. I could talk to the interviewers and they could see my code,” he says.
The interviewers could see every keystroke he was typing in real-time, which is akin to seeing his thought process. “We’ve built that intelligence into the platform so that one doesn’t have to depend on gut feelings and you actually see the candidate navigate through practical scenarios. Tech hiring then becomes super-efficient,” says Karpe. “We could challenge him in between via video and text chat, and with code replay we could get a mind map of the candidate.”
“The beauty of the platform,” says Vishal Madan, the head of engineering at iMocha and one of Nikhare’s evaluators, “is that the interviewers can see what the candidate is struggling with in real time.”
Unlike traditional whiteboard interviews, candidates as well as interviewers can compile and run the code to see whether it works, which leads to more engaging conversations. Interviewers can also grade the candidate across multiple parameters while the session is on and submit their final score cards, which are tallied and made visible to the recruiter at the end of the session. Other interviewers, who were not part of the whiteboard round, can also see the code written by the candidate in the scorecard to make their assessment in later rounds.
Fortunately for Nikhare, he nailed his test and interview and landed a job at iMocha. “Given the present circumstances I really don’t know when I would have found a job if not for these features,” he says.
Since launching Live Coding Platform in July, iMocha’s customers have conducted over 800 interviews for recruiting new tech talent. The in-built video capabilities of the live coding platform, says Karpe, has been well-received by their clients. They are now busy adding new languages to the existing roster of 16 and diversifying the platform to tap other industries that might have similar requirements.
Dogfooding is not only encouraged at iMocha, but it is a way of life. Mishra and Karpe came upon the idea to launch iMocha (initially called Interview Mocha) appropriately enough over a cup of coffee. After discussing their own struggles to find good tech talent, they came up with the idea for creating a platform to help recruiters sift through resumes and test candidates for their core capabilities before taking them through time and resource consuming recruiting process.
“People can be lavish when they write resumes,” says Mishra, iMocha’s CEO. “If they’ve worked on something for a week, they’d say they were proficient in that task. In many cases the interview process just ends with good, billable hours being wasted.”
iMocha’s online platform provides recruiters with over 2,000 technical and non-technical skills assessment tests against which to assess potential candidates. Recruiters don’t have to spend any time monitoring the tests because iMocha’s AI proctoring tools guard against potential cheating. At the end of the test, recruiters get a report on the candidate’s performance and decide whether to proceed further with the candidature.
Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services APIs helped iMocha build their AI proctoring tools, including those to validate the candidate wasn’t cheating throughout the duration of the test.
When a client had a requirement to sift through hundreds of pre-recorded video interviews to shortlist candidates with good communications skills, Azure’s Natural Language Processing tools came to their rescue.
