How Rolling Arrays hired 20 top candidates in 2 months using iMocha assessments

Manu: Rolling Arrays is primarily an HR consulting company, wherein, we have two businesses. One is the professional services business – to provide HR system and HR management consulting services, second is our SaaS business – to provide HR software to enterprise customers.

The enterprise customers form majority of our portfolio. Rolling Arrays kickstarted in 2009 at Singapore-our headquarters. Over the years we have expanded to Malaysia, Hongkong, Dubai, Australia, and India. Circling back to your second question, currently we are a team of 130 people with 100 in services and 30 in the product business. In 2021, we plan to hire 20 people in product and around 50 in consulting. This I would say is on the lower end of the spectrum, we are sure that given our strategies, the actual numbers would be much higher.

Manu: We are pretty much a people business; I mean it comes with the territory. We focus a lot on our talent strategy as hiring the best talent will mean the best services to our customers. Goes without saying that it impacts our revenue, our credibility, and also market deliverables. So, six months back when we decided our hiring goals for 2021, my team and I brainstormed on the strategies that worked for us and what did not work.

We reviewed every job-role and mapped it to a skill-based competency. We discussed it with our hiring managers and hiring teams across our two businesses. When we did that, we were able to identify and categorize the technical skills and functional skills. This gave us a clear idea on the type of assessments that we needed. This is also one of the factors that led us to iMocha. The best part that we liked about your platform was the combination of readily available technical and functional skills. We could assess candidates on multiple parameters in a single assessment and that worked really well for us.

We also further refined our JDs based on the assessment result, the historical data, and the skills benchmarking. So, yeah, our strategy is to not rely on typical interviews but have a holistic approach towards hiring and select the top talent. It also helps that each assessment can be analysed and calibrated to optimize the process.

Manu: (smiles a bit) Good question. The one thing that prompted us to switch was iMocha provided a very comprehensive out-of-the box skill set readily available, something that the earlier partner lacked. Second, I would say your customer centric approach. Your team really wanted to understand our challenges and helped us leverage the platform by creating multiple assessments for every single job-role that we had. These two factors pretty much sealed the deal for us.

I would say that for any organization like us the comprehensiveness and the flexibility of customizing the assessments is something that benefits a lot. With respect to our Campus and Lateral Hiring, we saw a marked difference in the amount of time and effort that we had to invest. It was almost cut by half, our team were spending time only on relevant candidates, our reach had widened, and we could pick the top talent whether it was for lateral hiring or fresh graduates.

Manu: For our consulting business, we need people who can first understand the problems of our customers and resolve that with their expertise. So, yes, proficiency in technical skills is a must. For the soft skills part, cognitive ability is what we focus on.

Candidates with high reasoning capability, quick learning abilities, and attention to details. These are primarily the capabilities that would help to comprehend the customer issues correctly and provide solution. Apart from this we are exploring the situational question types which would give a deeper insight into the job ability of a candidate.

Manu: Oh Yeah! Video interview is a feature that we use a lot. It is the easiest tool that helps us eliminate a lot of candidates. Video Interviews helps understand the vibe of the candidate and we can easily assess the cultural fit- an important factor for us.

Technical or cognitive assessments cannot tell you that. Plus, it has saved a sizeable chunk of my Hiring Manager’s time which are billable hours. We can filter the candidates and shortlist the ones for an in-person interview. I would say it’s a very good value add where all round capabilities are assessed in one go. Our team loves this feature and no candidate till date has complained about any issues.

Manu: So, I would say 1.5 to 3 weeks. But afcourse, the time spent on the processes has reduced with optimal results.

Manu: Absolutely! Most of the times, we have been very successful with predicting the job readiness of candidates. This aspect has tremendously improved after switching to iMocha. There is also an increase in the satifaction index of the candidates we hire.