Added Confidence in Hiring with Technical Interview Support
Seek AI
SUMMARY
Seek AI had experienced early success and needed to grow their technical team, but wanted a more rigorous and nuanced approach toward evaluating their ML/AI candidates.
Seek’s leadership team was uncertain that a third-party assessment could truly help. How would any external evaluator understand their needs and culture, or match their high standards for hiring?
Having invested a considerable amount of thought and rigor toward hiring our own ML/AI engineers and researchers, Hop was able to bring depth and insight to the evaluation of Seek’s candidates.
Hop’s evaluators conducted thorough technical assessments aligned with Seek’s priorities and provided feedback with important context that enabled more fully informed hiring decisions.
With Hop’s contribution to their hiring process, Seek was able to sharpen the profile of who they were looking to hire, avoid mishires, and most of all, have more confidence in their hiring choices.
THE COMPANY
Seek AI is on a mission to democratize data access and break through the information barriers that impede business efficiency. They’ve engineered a system in which multiple AI agents work together to process non-technical users’ data queries and enable generation of accurate results. This multi-agent approach allows for more complex reasoning and problem-solving capabilities, and Seek’s platform allows users across organizations to easily request and instantly access vital data.
THE CHALLENGE
Seek AI had experienced early success and needed to grow their technical team, particularly their capacity for ML/AI research. To continue their trajectory of innovation, it was crucial to hire the right people. Seek’s leadership team, though well-versed in technology, wanted a more rigorous and nuanced approach toward evaluating their ML/AI candidates. Hiring for engineers was fairly well understood, but researchers are a more varied bunch, with skills that are uniquely challenging to assess in a hiring context.
Seek had very specific and unique needs for the role they wanted to fill, and a high bar for candidates to clear. It wasn’t certain that a third-party assessment could truly help. How would any external evaluator truly understand what they were looking for? Even if they did, Seek was uncertain anyone else would match their high standards for hiring. And how could an outside evaluator possibly know if someone was a good fit for their culture?
THE APPROACH
Hop Labs regularly hires both engineers and researchers in ML/AI to join our team. Because our company is solely focused on ML/AI, we have invested a considerable amount of thought and rigor toward hiring the right people in this particular space. Like Seek, Hop also maintains a high and principled hiring bar, influenced by our CEO’s experience as an Amazon Bar Raiser for many years.
Though we have a fairly detailed understanding of the scope of an ML/AI researcher role, we also know that every company’s needs are unique. Our technical interviewers, ML/AI researchers themselves, met with Seek’s leadership team to understand their particular needs and to prioritize trade-offs accordingly. Collaboratively with Seek leadership, Hop established a detailed rubric against which to evaluate their candidates as per the company’s specific needs.
“Everybody on the Hop team asked very good, intelligent, sharp questions. I never had any doubts about the level of technical sophistication that they would bring to the interactions with our candidates.”
It was clear to Seek that Hop could add depth and insight to the evaluation of their candidates. Those who had made it through initial interviews with Seek’s hiring team were passed to Hop’s evaluators, who then conducted a thorough technical assessment. The written feedback from our hiring panel provided important technical context that enabled Seek to make a more fully informed hiring decision.
THE RESULTS
While partnering with Hop helped in a number of ways, the primary value for Seek AI in this engagement was the added confidence in their hiring choices.
“The true value was in adding confidence to our evaluations – that extra layer of impartial scrutiny helped us to know if we were on the right track with the way we felt about a candidate.”
Seek’s leadership also found unexpected value in the initial conversations led by Hop to gain a deep understanding of their needs. Probing questions around certain qualities of the ideal candidate and the trade-offs to consider sharpened the profile of what Seek was looking for. This impacted the interviews and internal discourse for each candidate before they were even passed along to Hop.
“I definitely left those early interactions feeling like my understanding of what we were after was sharper than it was when we started.”
In some cases, the perspective Hop added to the review of a candidate helped to avoid a mishire as well. Whether prompting a deeper look at a favored candidate that ultimately revealed a skills mismatch, or highlighting strengths in another candidate that resulted in hiring him for a different role, our technical evaluations added nuanced insights for better hiring decisions.
“We got exactly what we wanted. And our candidates reported that they enjoyed the intentionality of the process too.”
Hop is glad to have been able to support Seek in this fundamental capacity. Hiring in ML/AI can be challenging, but we’ve successfully navigated those waters many times. We’re happy to share our expertise to help other teams achieve the next level of success with the right people.
Want to feel more confident about your hiring decisions? Contact us to learn how Hop can help.