How Remote Engineering Quadrupled Our Hiring Rate at Coinbase

What Was The Problem?

Last year we faced a major problem: engineering had become a bottleneck for the company. We needed to hire more engineers quickly yet maintain our hiring bar.

We brainstormed a number of ideas and decided to try hiring remote engineers.

What Are The Risks?

We saw two main risks in hiring remote engineers: communication and accountability; where teams distributed amongst various locations tended to make both more challenging. To compensate for this, we decided to adjust the recruiting process by holding a higher than normal bar for communication and autonomy.

With the risks considered we chose to execute our plan.

How Did We Do It?

The CEO/cofounder wrote a post on Medium announcing we were hiring remote engineers. At the end of the blog post we invited interested readers to take an open coding challenge where only an email address (no resume) was required for a submission. About 80% of people applied this way rather than the traditional web form via the careers page or by email to talent@coinbase.com.

Of the 800 or so people that took the coding challenge, only ~8% (~66 people) met the required threshold to be screened. From those 66 phone screens, we brought 9 on-site for interviews, whereby 5 were ultimately hired. You can see how the numbers compare to the standard in-house recruiting process for Q1 of 2016 below:

What Are The Initial Results?

• We more than doubled our funnel

   

  at just about every stage, including engineers hired.

• We’ve been able to tap into

   

  a lot

   

  of talented and interested engineers who live outside the Bay Area that we previously could not access.

• The remote hiring process was more efficient when coupled with a coding challenge because 90% of the candidates were filtered out by test scores. There was additional manual work required to reach out to candidates via email to get more information about them afterwards, but this was outweighed by the filtering the coding challenge provided.

• One thing happened that we didn’t expect: people who started as remote candidates occasionally became in-house candidates. One person that joined us in-house started as a remote candidate.

• Fewer candidates made it from a screening to an on-site interview for the remote role, largely because we lost signals on a candidate’s communication skills that we’d typically get from their email, resume, or web applicant form.

How Has It Worked Out So Far?

It’s still early for our new remote engineers (it’s only been 2 to 4 months) but things are working well so far. There are some limitations such as their projects that tend to be more individual tasks but we’ve reached a number of talented engineers we wouldn’t have been able to work with otherwise, and it’s given engineering the recruiting push it really needed. Our early thesis is that it works well up until a certain point (perhaps 30% of engineering and we are currently at 17%) and we will continue to hire remote engineers as we continue to evaluate this campaign.