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Hired acquires YC alum Py to bring candidate assessments to its developer recruitment platform


Hired, a recruitment marketplace that connects companies with technology talent, has announced that it will now help its clients assess and screen potential clients too.

Powering this new service is a San Francisco Y Combinator alum called Py, which Hired has acquired for an undisclosed amount.

By way of a quick recap, Hired differs from many other recruitment platforms insofar as applicants don’t apply to companies for jobs — instead, companies apply to hire people. Candidates put themselves forward for any number of positions by creating a profile that outlines their skills and experience, and then companies make an offer if they like what they see. The beauty of this platform, from a worker’s perspective at least, is that they can compare offers and take their preferred pick. Hired has raised in the region of $130 million since its inception in 2012, including a $30 million tranche last summer.

Py, for its part, graduated Y Combinator in 2017 when it was a mobile app for teaching the fundamentals of coding. In the intervening months, Py has shifted its focus into more of a evaluation tool for companies to assess the skills of engineers. The company offers a number of tools to help simulate real-world challenges, while a product called LivePad allows companies to interview would-be hires in a live coding environment. In its short life so far, Py says that it has garnered 500,000 users and works with clients including Wag, Opendoor, Ninatic to help them screen technical talent.

As a result of this acquisition, the entire Py team — including its founder Derek Lo — have been hired, so to speak, by Hired. And its core product — Py for Work — is now called Hired Assessments.

Above: Hired Assessements: Candidate report

Hired Assessments will include many of the same features offered by Py, including coding quizzes, challenges, and the live coding environment. Interestingly, Hired is pitching this product as something that will remove bias from the recruitment process, as it will be standardized testing — at a time when many of the big technology companies are being scrutinized for equality, this could be a big selling point for existing customers such as Dropbox, Booking.com, and Nordstrom.  That said, Hired said it will also allow companies to customize the tests to prioritize specific skill assessments.

“With Py founder Derek Lo, we saw a shared vision for making hiring easier for everyone,” noted Hired’s VP of strategic development Andre Charoo. “For companies, this means helping them hire in-demand talent quickly and predictably, and for job seekers, it is about empowering them to land their dream job. By combining Py’s technical assessment expertise with Hired’s dependable pipeline of first-rate talent, we’re ready to transform today’s hiring standards.”

It’s worth stressing that these assessments are not part of the interview process — they are designed as a first-line of screening before the interviews even start. Candidates won’t necessarily have to participate, but those who do off their own volition will be “fast-tracked through the interview process,” according to Hired CEO Mehul Patel.

“Ultimately, Hired Assessments will deliver a more seamless interview process by unlocking time savings for candidates and helping them land their dream job more efficiently than ever,” he said.

Py represents Hired’s fourth known acquisition, after it snapped up a triumvirate of companies from the U.S., France, and Australia back in 2017.



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