The Startup Advisor: What if job candidates were treated like customers?

What if someone actually made interviewing enjoyable? Mohit Bhende, Co-Founder of Karat, wondered the same thing as an executive at Microsoft XBOX. Ever-passionate about recruiting and how to best develop talent, he now oversees a company of individuals committed to not only making the interview process smarter, but also a customer-centric experience for candidates — and grounded in skills, not pedigree. In fact, Karat established the category of “Interview Engineering.” But, just what is an Interview Engineer, and what do they do?

Bhende took a moment away from skiing, cooking, and his role as father to two very active kids to explain.

What problem or challenge motivated you to found Karat?

[At Microsoft XBOX], our success depended on hiring software engineers — but we didn’t have the engineering bandwidth to both interview candidates and ship product. Nor did we have the interviewing consistency to hire predictively because interviewing was no one’s full-time job. This created an Interview Gap: a delta between the number of consistent, high-quality interviews we could conduct and the number we needed to conduct. We came up with a band-aid by recruiting a few retired engineers to interview on our behalf. That experience got me thinking that interviewing needed to be a full-time engineering job.

My co-founder Jeffrey Spector was Chief of Staff to Melinda Gates at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He was studying hiring processes and finding that most were inconsistent and inflexible for candidates. He wondered what an experience would look like if candidates were treated like customers.

As every company becomes a tech company, the need for engineers grows and we need technical interviews to fuel this digital transformation. The Interview Gap impedes the ability of companies to hire engineers and for talented professionals to land great jobs. So, we founded Karat to close the Interview Gap.

What is the solution your company puts in place to address this problem?

We made technical interviewing a job. Just like iOS engineers build iOS applications, we have a community of engineers who focus 100% on interviewing: they are Interview Engineers. Interview Engineers leverage Karat’s interviewing infrastructure — software, data, and battle-tested questions — to conduct technical interviews on behalf of organizations. Companies send us their job candidates and our Interview Engineers interview them.

We’re also leveraging our dataset of more than 50,000 interviews to power structured hiring processes. Structured hiring makes the process more predictive, fair, and enjoyable for candidates and teams.

What are the results of the implemented solution?

Karat clients were able to realize a 20% lift in hiring goal attainment. That can mean gaining 10,000+ engineering hours each year back to development just by reducing the time spent on interviewing.

Candidates prefer our responsive experience: 60% choose to interview on nights and weekends, we give them the option to redo the interview, and 98% of the time they rate the experience 4 or 5 stars out of 5.

Interview Engineers enjoy the flexibility of the job: they are located in more than 25 countries, set their own schedules, and can leverage the job to get exposure to new technologies.

What’s a tough lesson you learned from founding your own company?

Transitioning from the executive track at Microsoft to being an entrepreneur required me to retool how I motivate myself. Instead of looking to the next promotion or raise, you have to become self-motivated. I learned new ways to get support and validation and how to set my own metrics and hold myself accountable. For example, one of our goals was to book $1 million in revenue in our first year. This was a simple way to measure if we were on the right track towards creating a solution that companies needed and candidates enjoyed.

My take on this: After spending years as a CLO and VP at the world’s largest B2B software company, I have overseen thousands of hires and how vitally important they are to a company’s growth. Karat’s brilliant innovation allows both parties to shine and increases not only the efficiency, but also the effectiveness, of a company’s hiring strategy. Sounds like a win-win for all.