Meet Ada, the bot that could be conducting the technical round of your job interview

A conversation with chatbots sometimes seems like you are conversing with...well, a bot. A one-sided conversation with someone who doesn't really get what you mean. Now, meet the new-age bot Ada. It was created by the good folk at Adaface to ease the recruitment process. "The central idea was to mimic the interviewing experience and ask the right technical questions so that the right candidate gets through," says Siddhartha Gunti, the Co-founder and CEO of Adaface. Though they are incubated at Entrepreneur First (EF) in Singapore, they have clients all over the world. Also currently, owing to the pandemic, Siddhartha is back in his hometown of Hyderabad and is working from there. The start-up itself was launched in May 2018 and after meticulously working on Ada, they launched it just last year. Well, it takes a lot to develop a bot that offers a human-like interview experience. "In fact, our average rating is 4.5, none of the candidates feel like they are chatting with a bot and they have expressed this time and again," says the 27-year-old.

Co-founders Deepti Chopra and Siddhartha Gunti | (Pic: Adaface)

Let's get down to business now. Ada offers a 45-minute chat and the questions asked are always customised as per the job role. Apart from testing technical abilities like software engineering frameworks, languages and more, Ada is capable of testing logical ability, aptitude, personality tests and the like. These questions are curated by a set of industry experts hailing from Google, Goldman Sachs — where Siddhartha himself has worked previously — and many more. They have a library of many such questions. What is special about Ada is that it is kind. At least it's programmed to be. We say this because it gives candidates hints when they are stuck with a technical question, sometimes on its own and other times, upon request as well. "And accordingly, it gives a report to the recruiters that this candidate needed a hint and wasn't able to get it right even after the hint," says the alumnus of IIT Bombay who pursued his Bachelor's in Computer Science.
 

The maximum time Adaface needs to custom-select questions for interviews is 48 hours

While most of the questions are MCQs (Multiple Choice Questions), they also have questions like the one on coding, where the candidate is required to code along with Ada. The bot can test candidates on as many as 700 skills. Also, currently, Adaface is being used by the Singapore Government, tech giants, Fortune 500 staffing companies, Fortune 100 professional services companies among others.  Recently, they have also expanded in the Indian market with clients like Hanu Software, Optimum Solutions, Monocept and so on. Internationally, Adaface is used in the US, the UK and Dubai. 

From the portal | (Pic: Adaface)

"The biggest advantage of having a bot conducting the technical rounds is that it keeps bias out of the hiring process. This way, the bot can help get people from diverse backgrounds on board," explains Siddhartha, who hails from Kodad in Telangana. With everything going remote, including a few rounds of interviews, this is the right time for Ada, opines the entrepreneur. Plus, there is a strong need to automate the hiring process.  
 

"It was when I was building my own engineering teams that I realised how hard it is to hire candidates," says Siddhartha Gunti  

Ada can test:
- Programming languages like C, C++, JavaScript, Python and about 30 others
- Aptitude tests like logical and verbal reasoning, data analysis and 20 more
- Framework specific tests like Spring, Django, Android and 25 more
- Database tests like SQL, MySQL, MSSQL and 15 others

For more on them, check out adaface.com