Byteboard’s skills-based interviews have enabled us to confidently hire a strong team of talented individuals year after year at Lyft, while saving us hundreds of engineering hours previously spent on less effective interviewing processes. Byteboard has been a great partner in helping us expand our University and Apprentice programs and identify and hire a diverse talent pool that represents the breadth of the communities we serve.

Eisar Lipkovitz, VP of Engineering

‍

Lyft’s mission is to improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation. To deliver on their mission, they need to attract the best, most diverse talent pool that represents the breadth of the communities they serve. Lyft’s University Programs Team has been partnering with Byteboard for the last three years to expand opportunities for more individuals to interview with Lyft.

Challenges

At Lyft, increasing representation and maintaining a positive candidate experience are priorities, but the engineering team found themselves overwhelmed with the candidate interviewing process. The University Programs’ recruiting team also found themselves frustrated with inefficient assessment tools and the lack of transparency into a candidate’s technical skill level. The program is highly-respected and candidates were eagerly applying, but the team was struggling to improve the interviewing process—without risking the quality of their thoughtful interviewing culture. From recruiting to interviewing and assessing, there was an urgent need for a more efficient process.

Solutions

When the Lyft team heard about Byteboard, they were skeptical. They had tried many tools in the past that were not successful at achieving great results onsite, ultimately costing the team more time and resources. How could Byteboard improve the assessment process while shortening their interview timeline? With an early pilot, Lyft quickly found Byteboard’s comprehensive skills-based interview to drastically improve their onsite-to-offer results and overall candidate experience, enabling the Lyft team to increase their top-of-funnel volume by 5x from previous years, as they were no longer as bottlenecked on engineering interviewer time. The team was able to fill 78% of their roles in less than 2 months compared to 50% in the past. This meant Lyft could confidently identify strong talent early and quickly get them an offer.

Results

Since adopting Byteboard as their primary pre-onsite technical interview platform for college and graduate-level internships, Lyft has been able to interview five times more intern candidates and shorten our interview timelines by half. This gets offers to top talent faster and allows us to make more internships available to candidates from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds in tech. And Byteboard’s approach to assessing candidates on core software engineering skills through practical, real-world problems provided candidates with a taste of how their engineering teams operate at Lyft. This year, Lyft has also expanded Byteboard into their Frontend SWE and Mobile SW interview processes, as well as the Lyft Apprenticeship Program—connecting engineers from nontraditional professional backgrounds to opportunities to scale in a growth-centered environment.

Read more on the Lyft blog

Byteboard has been a game-changer across the board for our recruiting team, hiring partners, and candidates. By utilizing the technical assessment at the top-of-funnel, our recruiters have more time to dedicate to strategic recruiting and finding great talent. Our hiring partners love the reduction in engineering hours spent interviewing and the data we are able to share, like accurate pass-through-rates and onsite-to-offer metrics. Our candidates are able to shine by focusing on engineering skills that are actually used on the job, which allows them to confidently show off their role-related skills in an environment that is less performative than traditional interviewing. From all angles, Byteboard is an impactful tool that we use and fully stand behind the team and mission to disrupt the technical interviewing process.

Katelyn Amidon, Recruiting Manager

‍

I’ve never coded a project like this for an interview. It got me really excited about the type of products I might get to build at Lyft.

Lyft Candidate, November 2019