Case Study: Prevent mis-leveled hires and save engineering time

How Woven helped Warmly make their hiring and productivity “infinitely better”.

See how you can, too. ⬇️

đź’¸ Background

As an engineering leader, you are continually balancing pressures to grow quality teams without sacrificing productivity or product goals, and many teams feel like they’re losing at both.

Not only is hiring incredibly expensive in time and resources, but combine this with low-signal technical assessments and you’re left with significantly decreased productivity that still results in a mis-hire. 

Double yikes. 

 

🔂 The Situation

Warmly, a Series A YC company backed by NFX, was growing their small team of engineers and their problem was twofold:

  • not only did their productivity tank during long hiring stints—
  • they also weren’t hiring the right people.

CTO, Alan Zhao, and his team were stuck in the expensive loop of interviewing -> hiring -> training -> and churning.

This makes it pretty difficult to grow the team or make critical progress on the product.

 

🔍 The Solution

Have Woven replace their 2 hours of live technical screening with an asynchronous Woven assessment.

They chose high-signal scenarios that matched their role priorities, which they benchmarked using their existing team. This resulted in a very high bar for determining who advanced to conversations with their team, and also for who they’d eventually hire.

The Results

Woven was the solve for several areas of pain (candidate quality, speed of hire, and mis-hires), but we’ll let Alan’s words do the talking. ⬇️

Results

Quality

Before Woven, Warmly mishired twice. Alan says “they were too junior. The way we screened was not good because we asked a lot of questions that were hypotheticals. The performance was bad.”

Since using Woven to assess their candidates, “our engineering team is the best it’s ever been. We have a team of rockstars [whose] technical abilities were without question.” 

Productivity

Hiring seasons used to cost Warmly’s small engineering team 80-90% of their productivity during a given sprint.

Alan says “we never hit any of our sprint goals.” With Woven, their engineers talk to fewer candidates for less time, leading to better performance: “we’ve deployed and done more work over the course of a week, even during hiring season, than we ever have before. And we brought on more senior engineers….Everything is just infinitely better.”

Hiring Velocity

Candidates no longer have to schedule multiple live technical screenings with Warmly.

Now candidates can take the Woven assessment as soon as they pass the phone screen, and Woven turns around results in 1 business day.

Hiring a senior engineer used to take 2 months, but Warmly’s most recent hire took only 2 weeks. Alan says it’s a relief to know that with Woven, they could backfill an experienced engineer in a matter of weeks.

focus on what matters

Set a High Bar, Grow Quickly, & Build Great Product

To build top-performing engineering teams who create high quality product, Alan says: “Hiring is the most upstream place you can solve these problems. Everything downstream starts with this. Woven is at that choke point.”

Now It's Your Turn

Try Woven on Real Candidates

Get top candidates in your pipeline, tomorrow.

Try it Free Get a Demo