AcuityMD on Boosting Hiring Efficiency and Achieving 54% On-Site to Offer Rate

AcuityMD’s Innovation and Growth in MedTech

AcuityMD, a leading software company in the MedTech industry, provides bespoke solutions tailored to this complex field. From its inception, it has collaborated with a wide range of MedTech innovators, from large enterprises to startups.

AcuityMD's key differentiator is its innovative platform, designed to provide 'acuity', or precise understanding, of their users' specific markets. This software tool has been built with a focus on simplicity and immediacy, aiming to help users gain a rapid and clear comprehension of their respective market landscapes. This unique value proposition showcases AcuityMD’s commitment to supporting businesses in navigating and succeeding in the MedTech industry.

A fully remote company, AcuityMD secured a $38M Series A funding round and has been growing ever since. A key company value is constructing an enjoyable and effective interview process that prioritizes attracting top industry talent.

Growing Pains in Scaling the Interview Process

In its early days, AcuityMD used a take-home interview process with a vague task for potential hires. This approach had a 40% completion rate and only a 10% pass rate. While it helped identify high-quality talent, it was inefficient and not scalable. Upon raising Series A funding and needing to expand hiring, AcuityMD switched to HackerRank, a platform known to help scale hiring. They designed a one-hour, less ambiguous challenge, hoping to boost completion rates. This shift resulted in a substantial rise in completion to 75%. However, it also led to an unexpected surge in the pass rate to 90%, causing inefficiencies in later interview stages due to insufficient candidate filtration.

Streamlining Recruitment: Achieving a 54% On-Site Pass Rate and an NPS of 75 with Hatchways

Adopting Hatchways appeared to be the perfect solution for AcuityMD. The platform enabled AcuityMD to retain the core concept of the original take-home assessment while transforming it into a more practical format. Instead of giving candidates an ambiguous task, they were instructed to modify and recommend improvements to an existing codebase, mirroring real job tasks. This more realistic workflow combined with the use of Hatchways’ analytics and proprietary marking tools resulted in exceptional completion and pass-through rates. This new approach not only improved the hiring process but also minimized the time spent on reviewing each assessment.

Key strategies we adopted included:

• Tracking metrics like completion and passthrough rates closely, ensuring high success rates in the final rounds.
• Conducting Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys and candidate interviews to improve completion rates.
• Iterating on the assessments and rubric based on qualitative and quantitative data.

We established a detailed skills matrix and a transparent marking rubric to evaluate candidates. The matrix covered four primary aspects: Correctness, Efficiency, Code Extensibility, and Technical Explanation, each scored on an explicit 5-point scale. A system of recommendation levels was put in place, which varied according to a candidate's seniority level, significantly optimizing our pass-through rates (learn more here on how to create effective levelling).

Following these modifications, our final assessment framework achieved some impressive metrics: a 75% completion rate, a 33% pass-through rate, and a substantial 54% final round pass-through rate. To put this into perspective, nearly half of the candidates reaching the final round secured an offer. This not only resulted in considerable time savings for their engineering team but also greatly reduced interview fatigue. As an engineering manager, Alexander Quatrano, highlighted:

The Hatchways exercise saved significant time for our team by producing fewer false positives. We gave offers to half the candidates we interviewed and were able to fail fast in some cases by sequencing interviews based on feedback from the Hatchways assessment.

With an NPS score of 75 in our candidate survey, and several candidate emails mentioning a positive candidate experience, AcuityMD’s boasts similar metrics to top tech companies in the industry.

Continuous Innovation and Improvement

Continuous improvement remains a cornerstone of how we partner with employers. Using powerful data and analytics, we persistently improve and optimize on-site pass-through rates and obtain valuable hiring insights. AcuityMD has proven to be a resourceful partner in this journey, always open to exploring fresh strategies to improve hiring decisions and candidate experience.

One innovative approach we've jointly started employing is using ChatGPT to power a powerful AI 'pairing partner' for applicants. This feature allows applicants to interact with the AI as if they were in a live pair programming exercise (minus the anxiety of coding in front of another person!), providing them with support and responses to their questions. This setup not only assists applicants but also gives hiring managers additional perspective on how candidates communicate and where they might encounter difficulties. It's exciting that AcuityMD and Hatchways' collaborative exploration of new methods will continue to advance the hiring process.

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