Cool stats of the month

May’s signs of love from our clients

Welcome to another edition of our Happiness Report! This month we look back and reflect on the month of May and at what we’ve learned, implemented, and have planned.

If you read last month’s report, you might remember that our median response time had crept up on us a bit as a result of increased traffic, increased onboarding of clients, increased projects being posted and we had just removed our expert apply page from public view. This of course resulted in a sudden increase of developers messaging us in support asking where the page went.

So in the month of April, we replied to 987 (90.4%) with a median first response time of 21 minutes.

Our goal for the month of May was to get down to 15 minutes, hopefully less. This would have been around a 30% decrease in our median first response time.

I’m unbelievably proud of our team to have Shattered that goal! Our new stats for the month of May are: Replied to 1,001 (85.6%) with a median first response time of 5 minutes

This is approximately a 75% decrease in response time!! Go team!!

Introducing our new screening process (codename "it ain't easy, baby")

By fully redeveloping our review and screening process we’ve set out to assemble the best source of WordPress developers on the internet. Our original vetting process made us known around the internet and quickly grew our word of mouth and has helped us achieve our record growth of 10% average month after month for the last 40 months.

To maintain this growth and even exceed it, we decided to implement a brand new review and screening process that combines language and communication screening, test projects, personality and professionalism screening, as well as live code testing. It was a lot of work and we really want to take a moment to acknowledge the massive effort made by our team and led by Christopher Churchill and Liam Bailey, who pushed to get it implemented in record time.

Now we’re excited to announce that every single applicant will be going through this screening process ensuring our clients are being helped by the best of the best.

So just how good is the screening process?

Step 1. The Application

49% of all applicants don’t make it past the initial screening of language and communication based on their application they submit. If they aren’t able to clearly communicate to us about themselves, they will certainly have challenges communicating with clients. All Codeable experts must be able to clearly read, write, and speak English.

Step 2. The Test Project

We then send the remaining applicants a test project that they must complete and send back to us demonstrating they are able to write clean, well-commented code and are able to put together a beautiful website.

63% of the remaining applicants are removed in this stage and do not progress to the next.

Step 3. The Live Interview and Live Coding Test

Next, each candidate is scheduled for a live interview with one of our in-house senior developers and one of our Happiness Heroes. This is where we test their communication, ask them questions about how they would respond in certain client/project situations, and then conclude with a live coding test. This process eliminates another 33% of remaining applicants.

Step 4. The Final Interview with Per

When a candidate makes it this far, they are fully screened and vetted to be great Codeable experts who are professional, experienced, responsive, and friendly. They understand our mission and how we’re trying to save the internet from bad online outsourcing and provide a safe and enjoyable experience for both clients and experts so that they can come together to collaborate, share ideas and complete projects from around the world.

We feel comfortable standing behind these experts 100% with our warranties and protections, including our money back guarantee, knowing they will provide a great experience for our clients. An experience that we can be proud of.

Step 5. 30 Day Trial Period

It’s rare, but not everyone who becomes a Codeable expert has what it takes to remain an expert. After 30 days, we carefully look at the performance of each expert to determine if they are a great fit to continue working together. The ones who remain after this 30 day period are granted their official Certified Codeable Expert status. These experts have demonstrated excellence in their communication with clients regarding responsiveness, communication, meeting deadlines, and cleanly written code that is well commented.

Of course, it goes without saying that experts need to maintain the high-quality standards we have. Otherwise, they can still be deactivated for not delivering on our quality promise.

What does June have in store?

Plenty! First off, the entire core Codeable team will be attending WordCamp Europe in Vienna, where our Founder and CTO Tomaž Zaman, will be giving a presentation called ‘You are too cheap.’ In his talk, he is going to highlight some of the mistakes we all do as freelancers, that hurt us as individuals and the industry as a whole.

We will also have around 35 of our Codeable experts attending the event and we’re super excited to see everyone! We chat with them almost daily and so it’ll be really nice to see everyone in person for a change.

We are back on track for the month of June in getting through our expert applications that have accumulated while we were busy implementing our new review and screening system. Our new process is working really great and is helping us more easily find the best of the best WordPress developers who will be working with our clients.

With our first median response time getting down to 5 minutes, I imagine it will be difficult to best that figure until we hire another Happiness Hero in support, so our goal is to maintain our 5 minute response time while replying to more tickets. So instead of replying to 85.6% with a median first response time of 5 minutes, I’d love to see us achieve 88% within 5 minutes.

If you happen to be attending WordCamp Europe, please stop us to say Hi! We'd love to meet you!