Lytmus: Tailor-made candidate assessment and hiring

Abhay Parekh, Co-founder & CEO

Innovation stems from the human component of an organization: its employees. However, gauging that talent isn’t an easy process. Companies spend considerable time and effort in short-listing, interviewing, and testing potential candidates. When it comes to hiring technical candidates, hiring managers must resort to more novel approaches to effectively screen and hire the most skilled candidates.

It’s well known that a formal academic background or years of experience aren’t a reliable benchmark for identifying true talent. And to make things even more challenging, it’s nearly impossible to assess a candidate’s ability to practically apply technology by the weight of their resume alone.

Lytmus helps bring the human back into the hiring process. Lytmus is a technology solution provider designed to help make hiring the best candidate faster and easier than ever before.

Co-founder and CEO, Abhay Parekh shares some key facets of the Lytmus mission and platform:

The necessity behind the invention

The idea for the Company was conceived by my partner and Co-founder, Pedro Pinto and me.

As a long-time entrepreneur, I’ve worked for a number of companies in a variety of spaces, including some technical areas in computer science and networking. One constant I’ve discovered is that the hardest things about growing a company is hiring effectively.

Hiring technical talent for a range of specialized positions is especially challenging, and one thing I realized while teaching at UC Berkeley (I’m a faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department) is how quickly the skills landscape changes. As a result, tech companies spend an inordinate amount of time evaluating the skills of candidates for their most bleeding-edge, crucial tech roles.

Pedro and I both knew there had to be a better way, and we took this perspective to heart as we set out to create the world’s best platform for evaluating a broad range of technical skills—a platform that could adapt as the hiring landscape evolved and would relieve the demands on evaluators and hiring managers.

Our approach is simple: The Lytmus platform is like a flight simulator used to evaluate pilots. Which pilot would you hire? One who can pass a multiple-choice test, or one who’s demonstrated that they can fly and land a plane in stormy weather? The Lytmus platform is the flight simulator for assessing technical skills.

Welcome help for HR professionals

From an HR perspective, the Lytmus platform makes assessing and hiring technical talent a faster and easier process, empowering HR teams to quickly and easily assess candidates for a wide range of positions—without the need for specific technical knowledge or expertise.

Impressed by Lytmus. It's a platform for administering real-world programming tests for job applicants in their environment

Employers can also send out assessments to candidates from their applicant tracking system (ATS) and follow up on results after the candidates have completed it. Automated grading helps reduce the burden on recruiters and hiring managers by automatically reporting what the candidate has achieved, and how well.

Additionally, the platform also helps address the pervasive challenge of unconscious bias in gender and cultural equality in recruiting. Because of the platform’s ability to assess candidate’s real-world skills and experience, hiring managers and recruiters are less inclined to be swayed by biases and are more focused on the demonstrated results.

Software-assisted evaluation

The Lytmus platform is cloud-based, empowering candidates with a custom computer, anytime, anywhere. By using a virtual machine, Lytmus can load all the tools, environments, and programming languages required to solve the everyday technical challenges encountered on the job, in a native setting.

The platform also has monitoring and grading software that empowers hiring managers and recruiters to monitor candidates’ progress as they solve job-specific problems, giving them an in-depth report of a candidate’s performance.

Lytmus also saves hiring teams time downstream, alleviating the need to rely on engineers to evaluate candidates— something that’s not typically part of their job description, not to mention a good use of their valuable time.

The platform also helps employers gather data on how candidates are performing on assessments. It enables HR to measure the typical performance of a candidate from a specific university, for example.

We performed an informal study during a campus hiring event which uncovered some fascinating conclusions. We discovered that certain universities were producing better-trained students. We also found that these universities weren’t necessarily considered elite— they just happened to have practical programs that were conducive to nurturing, real-life capabilities.

A solution for the future

One of our clients, Pinterest, started using the application a few years ago for their university hiring program.

Because we built the platform with evolution in mind, the folks at Pinterest can use the platform to constantly adapt and come up with their own ideas for questions. This means that they can incorporate Pinterest-specific features into their questions, using the Pinterest API and the platform is able to assess whether a candidate knows how to use the API.

Additionally, giving this test to thousands of people helped popularize and familiarize the platform. After adopting the Lytmus platform, Pinterest now saves 60 percent of their time on screening resumes and spend considerably less time interviewing candidates on-site as well.

An evolving hiring methodology

The future for Lytmus is exciting. We want to expand the use of our platform beyond technical hiring. There are sectors where Lytmus can make a difference, such as financial services, financial analysis, creative and design, and customer success.