Starting up with Tigran Sloyan

On Tuesdays, we get into the weeds with the founders of HR tech startups. Want to tell us about your company? Get in touch here.

Tigran Sloyan is the co-founder and CEO of CodeSignal, a skills assessment platform that helps employers eliminate some of the biases that come with interviewing and hiring candidates for technical roles. Since its founding in 2015, it has raised $87.5 million from a variety of investors, including Menlo Ventures and Human Capital. HR Brew spoke to Sloyan about the problems with résumés, why gauging skill through simulated assessments can open up doors for more candidates, and the future of HR tech.

What product or service does your company offer?

We’re an interview and assessment solution, specifically focused on helping our customers evaluate technical skills and technical talent. We’re hoping to help the world go beyond the noise of résumés [and] traditional interviews, and the biases that come with it.

How does it work?

It’s what we like to call the flight simulator approach…To truly understand how talented and how skilled somebody is, you’ve got to simulate whatever job you’re hiring them for. If you’re hiring for a front-end engineer, you want to simulate a front-end development environment, in which you can give them a chance to demonstrate their skills. So, we’ve built a work simulation based environment in which we can measure all sorts of skills, ranging from data scientists to machine learning engineers, to front-end engineers, and back-end engineers.

What problem or issue in HR does your company intend to solve?

The biggest one is eliminating biases and driving more diversity overall. A lot of people don’t realize how many of those biases and diversity issues start from the very [first] step of the hiring process, which is looking at someone’s résumé or LinkedIn profile. We can try as much as possible to minimize those biases, but we’re preconditioned…to have these patterns in our heads where, if we see someone who doesn’t fit the mold that we are conditioned to seeing, we unintentionally start to have a bias against them. Without some kind of a clear, unbiased, and fair evaluation of someone’s skills, we’re constantly going to be in this fight.

How does your company solve that specific issue?

The hiring process is full of noise. You apply for a job where you start recruiting somebody, and their résumé or LinkedIn profile is just full of noise. Then you move into the next step of the process, which is first-round interviews, and you’re trying to understand, is this person qualified for the job? But while trying to understand that, you are getting bombarded with a lot of noise in this process, which is limiting and really stifling your ability to really understand, is this the right fit or not? Our approach has been to help our customers reduce that noise and control that noise as much as possible.

How do you think HR technology will evolve in the next five to 10 years?

One aspect that we’re really driving heavily is that there will be more data, because, for far too long, this space has operated with an extreme lack of data and understanding. Everything has been proxy based. When you look at HR, hiring, promotion decisions, pay decisions, there’s very little data. The way you evaluate if someone is qualified, the way you look at internal mobility and transitions…it’s just full of biased judgments…The biggest advancement in the next 10 years is the embracing of a more data driven approach to working with and understanding humans.

How will your company help drive that evolution?

We’re very focused on the talent acquisition part of it right now. Talent acquisition is suffering really badly. Over time, my hope is that the platform, and the technology that we build which seeks to quantify skills can also be applied elsewhere. Either us or somebody else over the next 10 years will help stitch those gaps [in the hiring process] together, and have us be not only more data driven, but also more connected, having the individual at the center of it.

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