As a recently promoted manager for the Client Intelligence team at Doximity, I was responsible for leading the search for a new Business Intelligence Analyst. Requirements for this role include programming skills, effective communication, and business curiosity. Our interview process assesses skills through resume reviews, a take-home coding assignment, and live interviews.
I was excited to expand the team, but I did not have the personal experience to anticipate the challenges that I would face. The following article highlights these challenges, the solutions we employed, and the importance of having a supportive leadership team to maintain an effective hiring process.
Dive in and gain experience
There’s no better reality wake-up call than staring at hundreds of resumes pour in daily, including many qualified candidates deserving thoughtful consideration. Enter our first amazing resource, Doximity recruiters. The recruiter dedicated to my open role helped sift through these resumes by highlighting those that met the required criteria.
I also reviewed resumes myself, which I quickly learned can be daunting. There were days when I’d get through 100 applications just to wake up the next day to 150 more. By establishing a pre-defined filter for keywords (skills like “sql”, adjectives like “ad-hoc”, and nouns like “client” or “sales”), we were able to quickly surface the most relevant resumes and then spend more time fully reading through past job descriptions to find the highest potential candidates.
Typically, the next step in our interview process includes a five-question take-home assessment of our candidates’ Python and SQL skills, followed by a series of live interviews: two technical and one behavioral. We noticed a significant drop in candidates at this point in the process, mainly due to the assessment's incompletion.
Always look to improve. Lean on experts and data
Enter the second partners of this journey: Doximity’s health equity and inclusion leaders. Their team supports hiring managers to ensure inclusive hiring strategies are applied. I reached out and we got to work on critically evaluating our hiring process, including how we could improve the assessment stage of our process. It didn’t take long to identify that the take-home code test we were using could be unintentionally blocking high-potential candidates from making it to the live interview stage. Over half the candidates were failing and many of them were not completing the test.
One potential barrier was the length. The test was very long, and after a review with our health equity and inclusion strategy team, we concluded that an unnecessarily lengthy test could unintentionally introduce systemic bias against candidates who may lack as much free time as others. Unfortunately, this could disproportionately impact high-potential underrepresented groups.
As a solution, we reduced our five-question test to the three questions that we agreed were most representative of our work and made the problem statements clearer and more concise. This change directly led to a significant improvement in the take-home assessment—our completion rate improved from 50% to 67%, and our pass rate improved from 28% to 71%! The relatively high pass rate gave us significant additional data to assess how candidates approach problem-solving and communicate solutions, in addition to understanding their ability to solve problems independently.
This change directly led to a significant improvement in the take-home assessment—our completion rate improved from 50% to 67%, and our pass rate improved from 28% to 71%!
With this success, we decided to make two other adjustments. We altered the wording of the job description to more clearly align with the technical skills we were really searching for and refreshed our live Python interview questions and rubric—another big dropoff point for candidates.
Run the show
Even with some great improvements to our process, it took a few months to successfully fill the role. That time was filled with lively team debriefs and lots of potential candidates. My final lessons learned from this process came from Doximity’s Chief Technology Officer. When leading debrief meetings, it’s critical to ensure everyone’s opinion is heard and take the time to find the right candidate.
On any interviewing team, some voices might be louder than others, and that can easily discourage quieter contributors. However, everyone had a chance to meet the candidate and it’s important to hear each experience to make a well-informed decision. Your interviewing team can (and should) have diverse backgrounds to match the equally diverse experiences of your applicants. It’s also important to take the time to find the right candidate. Even if it’s taking longer than you anticipated, you’ll be saving time and stress in the long run (for both you and the candidate) by taking the time to find the right fit for the team’s current needs.
Like many aspects of our professional lives, being a successful hiring manager comes down to your ability to humbly evaluate your own preconceptions and adapt to whatever reality you’re facing. Have a goal in mind, but don’t be afraid to listen to the data, and learn from others’ experiences.