Adaface, a B2B tech startup that offers a skills assessment platform to identify the best engineering talent faster, is one of the seven startups of the first SAP.iO Foundry Singapore cohort launched in August 2019. Almost a year after the rollout of the program, we take a closer look at Adaface’s workspace platform.
As part of the SAP.iO Accelerator Program, Adaface had access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and application programmable interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers for 13 weeks. The company takes pride in their chatbot Ada facilitating conversational preliminary interviews of candidates.
Aside from being chosen to be included in the first batch of SAP.iO Southeast Asia cohort, coincidentally, Adaface was also recognised as part of the SAP.iO No Boundaries initiative of promoting a healthy ecosystem through diversity and inclusion in the SAP community by having Deepti Chopra as a co-founder and a female entrepreneur. Recently, Chopra shared with E-3 Magazine the backstory, product offerings, and latest update on the company.
Revolutionising Recruitment
Adaface aims to revolutionise traditional assessments in hiring developers by equipping recruiters with the right tools to assess candidates objectively for on-the-job skills in an efficient and automated way.
Co-founders Siddhartha Gunti and Deepti Chopra recognise the tech recruiters and the applicants’ predicaments in the whole hiring process. For the recruiters, the increase in tech roles means they have to screen a massive list of qualified applicants to find the best fit for the company– a lengthy and rigorous process. For the developers applying for the role, going through an interview knowing they are competing against hundreds and the conventional tests that use obscure computer science questions or niche algorithms that are never really used in practice are intimidating and stressful.
Adaface simplifies and shortens the rigid selection process by automating first-round tech interviews with shorter, candidate-friendly assessments, which lasts between 45-60 minutes, to test on-the-job skills. The customised assessments use simpler questions with a generous time allowance and extremely granular scoring that eliminates false positives and false negatives.
Chopra said:
“Our pre-built assessments for popular roles require no setup time, and you can use them by subscribing to a plan from our website in under 5 minutes.”
“For custom assessments that are tailor-made for your role according to your job description, our subject matter experts select the most relevant questions from our internal library of over 1,0000 non-googleable questions and make the assessment live on your dashboard within 48 hours,” she detailed.
Ada: The Intelligent Chatbot
The conversational approach of the Adaface skills assessment platform with the help of intelligent chatbot Ada is known to give candidates a pleasant application experience. Chopra shared that Gunti came up with the initial version of Ada.
“We built an intelligent chatbot, Ada, to enable companies to automate first-round interviews and understand if there is a mutual fit. This creates a friendly candidate experience and gives companies the ability to screen thousands of candidates within a few days,” she explained.
Ada has an in-built code editor to evaluate aptitude, technical and coding skills.
For coding/programming skills, the AI chatbot asks questions of all difficulty levels in data structures and algorithms. For on-the-job skills, Ada can screen for fundamentals and tech stack knowledge (Python, JavaScript, ReactJS, AngularJS, Android, iOS, etc.)
Ada can answer common candidate questions about the company, role, work culture, and career progression to assess candidate engagement. Furthermore, Ada creates a detailed scorecard for every conversation with a section-wise breakdown and a pass/ fail recommendation.
Since becoming part of the SAP.iO family, Adaface has received commendable reviews from candidates about Ada’s conversational assessments. Chopra shared that the company is focusing its efforts on SEO and content marketing for the past four months to reach companies that are already looking for recruitment automation tools. She commented:
“The goal is to always stay in touch with the ground reality of the problems faced by our customers. As long as we’re focused on solving a real pain-point faced by our customers, we will stay relevant.”
