About the company
Ottimate (formerly Plate IQ) makes accounts payable simple. It is an automated accounts payable software that replaces manual data entry by digitizing invoices down to the line item, automatically assigning them proper GL codes, syncing the information to accounting softwares, and providing analytics around purchasing. Ottimate also offers one-click bill pay, inventory, and cloud-based data storage that allows businesses to go paperless.
Company Size: 51-200 employees
Industry: Software Development
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Founded: 2014
The existing Hiring Process
"It's hard to look at the résumé or a candidate's profile and evaluate the key skills. Sometimes candidates partially match the target skill profile and our engineering team spends a lot of time shortlisting candidates for interviews because of the ambiguity in screening criteria." - Savita, Engineering Manager at Ottimate
After screening candidates manually for six months for tech roles, Ottimate knew they urgently required a screening tool to do the job for them. "The hiring agency sourced candidate profiles, which we shortlisted further based on CVs. The shortlisted candidates went through the technical rounds and the successful candidates finally received offers," says Savita, Engineering Manager at Ottimate.
| Stage | Process | Challenges |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Third-party staffing agencies share profiles with the recruiters at Ottimate | Large number of irrelevant profiles that do not match the hiring criteria |
| 2 | Résumé screening by Ottimate |
|
| 3 | One-on-one telephonic conversation for screening questions |
|
| 4 | Technical rounds for problem solving |
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In a nutshell, Ottimate had to improve their time to hire and the quality of hire.
Moving to Equip
Savita started searching for a pre-hiring assessment tool to tackle these problems. She created an Equip account and used her free credits to explore the platform. After internally evaluating the platform by adding team members from the hiring panel and creating multiple assessments for frontend developers and other technical roles, they were ready to start hiring with Equip in 2 weeks.
"One of the reasons I loved Equip was the ease of getting started. I created my account on my own within minutes, created assessments using the Question Banks and I experimented pretty easily with what kind of assessments work for us," shares Savita.
How Ottimate benefitted by choosing Equip
1. Combining multiple skills in a single assessment
Previously, the team had to decide how to deal with candidates with a partial skill match on a case-by-case basis. On Equip, they combined multiple skills in a single assessment. The individual scores per skill and the overall results were an excellent skill profile representation to select high-quality candidates for interviews.
2. Ready-to-use Question Banks
Equip offers vast Question Banks for both technical and non-technical skills. Ottimate created Quizzes and Programming tests using Django, SQL, Python, Selenium, Aptitude, English Language Question Banks from Equip's Content to hire backend developers, frontend developers and quality analysts.
3. Collaborating for improving interviews
With unlimited recruiter seats, everyone on the interview panel had access to candidates' results on Equip. The interview panelists could customise each interview based on the candidates' performance using the Test Summary and code submission on Equip. If a candidate did poorly on a particular skill, they asked a few simple questions about it. If the candidate failed to answer those too, they could objectively decide that the candidate was not the right fit for the role. The assessment results gave insights into the depth of the candidates' approach to solve a problem and eliminated those who relied on guessing the answers.
4. Pay-as-you-use pricing
With zero subscription costs and prices as low as $1/candidate, Equip was the right choice for a medium-sized company like Ottimate.
What made Equip the #1 choice of assessment platform for Ottimate?
"Credits are deducted only when a candidate completes the first test in an assessment. So that was crucial, we won't be losing money on no shows from candidates. We are a mid-sized company, we were looking for a price we could afford. So that made us choose Equip," shares Savita.
The Transformation
Ottimate has made six stellar additions to their team using Equip's assessments. The engineering team of about 40 people is super happy with the quality of hires as well as the time saved on screening and interviewing candidates for multiple positions.
Continue reading: How One Point One Solutions fast-tracked Tech Hiring with Skill Tests
