Searchlight helped Doximity grow from 200 - 800+ employees with high performance and retention

As Doximity’s Head of People Operations, Daisy Chu continuously thinks of better ways to up-level the talent they bring into the company. After seeing Searchlight’s quantified data on competencies, culture alignment, strengths and gaps, Daisy wanted to see if using Searchlight would streamline onboarding and increase hiring quality for one of their toughest candidate pools — engineers.

Doximity is the leading digital platform for medical professionals. The company’s network members include over 80% of U.S. physicians across all specialties and practice areas. Doximity provides its verified clinical membership with digital tools built for medicine, enabling them to collaborate with colleagues, stay up to date with the latest medical news and research, manage their careers and conduct virtual patient visits.

Part of their success comes from their emphasis on evaluating both technical skills and cultural values when interviewing candidates, especially on their engineering team. Because Doximity looks for engineers who want to have a positive impact on the world and who are constant learners, engineers often stay at the company for four or more years.

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Doximity improved hiring efficiency while increasing Quality of Hire with Searchlight’s pre-hire product suite

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After customizing Searchlight’s One-Click References to assess against Doximity’s engineering rubrics, Doximity invited candidates to gather their references on Searchlight when coordinating final round interviews. After just a few months of hiring with Searchlight, Doximity’s engineering team experienced 12% lower candidate drop-off rates at the offer stage, happier hiring managers, and saved 2 hours per candidate. Not only was Searchlight’s insights better than what they had seen before, but it was also much faster. References took 1.6 days on average to submit their feedback.

Searchlight Job Setup  also contributed to Doximity’s increased hiring effectiveness and hiring quality. By using Job Setup  to kickoff each role, hiring managers and recruiters aligned upfront on the competencies, strengths, cultural alignment, and career interests in the candidate success profile. Searchlight’s algorithms and people science then generated a behavioral profile and calculated a match score for each candidate based on their references’ 360-degree feedback. These customized reports highlighted when the manager’s desired strengths matched the candidate’s strengths. On the flip side, if the candidate had gaps where the manager wanted strengths, Searchlight visualized the discrepancy and prompted action to re-align on success criteria. Recruiters relied on Searchlight to bring structure and consistency to their normally intuition-driven job kickoff meeting. Hiring managers were automatically reminded of the things that they set out to hire for, and had data to back their decisions when a candidate was the right fit.

Recruiters and hiring managers were amazed at Searchlight’s data visualizations and reporting capabilities. Searchlight’s data not only provided a top-level summary, but also prompted action. For example, if more than two references mentioned that a candidate had a particular growth area, Searchlight emphasized this growth area as an area where they could dig deeper. If a manager diverged in opinion from a peer on a particular competency, Searchlight highlighted this divergence. Since they asked for references early with Searchlight, hiring panels have the Candidate Report by the time they’re ready to debrief. With Searchlight’s quantified data, Doximity’s hiring managers no longer had to guess about the candidate’s strengths and growth areas. Searchlight’s data and recommendations helped hiring managers make more confident and faster decisions.

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Doximity improved retention and employee performance with Searchlight’s post-hire product suite

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Hiring managers on the engineering team started to use Searchlight’s data during onboarding and to help develop employees. It became the engineering managers’ go-to tool to manage better from day one. For example, one of the most popular features of Searchlight’s data is a visualized set of strengths and gaps for each new hire. Managers used this information to personalize the onboarding experience, pairing new hires with teammates with complementary strengths and areas for growth. And, they used Searchlight’s actionable insights and orange flags to dig deeper on specific pieces of the feedback. Before Searchlight, Doximity’s hiring managers spent their first few conversation with new hires getting to know their strengths and gaps before crafting growth plans. With Searchlight’s holistic behavioral data, managers had a better sense of what to bring up and how to structure conversations with their new hires from day one.

After seeing the impact of Searchlight’s behavioral data in streamlining alignment and assessment pre-hire, Daisy wanted to make similar improvements to Doximity’s post-hire employee reviews. She tasked Searchlight with supporting people-centric lightweight check-ins focused on supporting effective manager conversations with their direct reports around career development. She had a strong aversion to using clunky performance management software that felt like a check-the-box exercise.

Anna Millhiser is the VP of Client Services and Hospital Solutions at Doximity  and was using Google Docs to capture notes from 1:1 conversations with her direct reports. She’d been working with some team members for six years, and her documents were getting long and it was difficult to find the most important information. She became an early adopter in using Searchlight Skills-based Assessments  to conduct a 360-degree review for each person on her team focused on the skills, culture, and competencies important to the job.

After Anna completed her first round of team check-ins, she understood the value of having Searchlight’s behavioral data to guide her management decisions. Searchlight’s structured, visual data surfaced areas where her ratings of a person’s skills and contributions aligned with their self-rating, and where their perceptions diverged. She used this knowledge to gut-check her own impressions and tweak her ratings where appropriate. When her rating was higher than the employee’s, she encouraged her team member to be more confident in their strengths. Where her rating was lower than the employee’s, she used their next 1:1 to re-align on expectations and discuss where her team member could further develop their abilities. Using Searchlight, Anna gained a source-of-truth where she could track the trend lines of each employee’s key development areas over time and know where to invest more time and energy. Overall, she appreciated Searchlight for providing an effective launchpad for productive career development conversations. Anna said, “The old way of checking in with my team was clunky, Searchlight is much smoother.”

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