How inDrive cut time-to-hire from 3 weeks to 1 week and increased L&D participation by 82% with Testlify

A global workforce. No shared standard for hiring or development.

inDrive was founded in 2013 in Yakutsk, Russia, and grew into a $1.23 billion platform with operations across Latin America, Africa, Central Asia, and beyond. The company hires around 1,000 people each year across a workforce of over 5,000, with 350+ applicants per role on average. Every one of those candidates was being evaluated manually. There was no structured assessment in place, no consistent way to measure whether a candidate met the requirements of the role, and no shared standard for English proficiency across markets where language ability varied significantly and directly affected how well employees could collaborate across teams.

Candidate evaluations and skill assessments accounted for 85% of the hiring team’s total effort. Hiring a single role took three weeks on average. The team had no capacity to move faster, because every step of the process required a human to do it.

On the development side, the People team had no baseline data on the skills of employees already in the business. Training programs across teams were being designed and run without knowing who actually needed them. Companies that skip structured skill gap assessment spend an estimated 40% of their L&D budget on employees who do not need the training, according to Deloitte research. For a company the size of inDrive, that was a significant and avoidable waste.

“Before Testlify, our hiring process was mostly manual, and assessing candidates’ English skills was a challenge. As a global company, that mattered a lot.”

Andrei Ivanov
Training Coordinator, inDrive

The team needed a way to assess candidates consistently across every market they hired in and a way to evaluate existing employees so development investment could go to the right places. Neither existed before Testlify.

How Testlify was implemented

Structured screening for candidates. A skills baseline for employees.

For hiring, inDrive used Testlify to assess candidates on domain-specific skills; English proficiency using the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), the international standard for measuring language ability; and personality. Assessments were completed before any recruiter time was spent. Automated workflows handled invitations, tracked completions, and surfaced results, removing the manual coordination that had consumed the team. Over 1,300 people were assessed for English proficiency alone, giving inDrive a consistent language standard across every market it hired in.

For existing employees, Testlify gave the People team a structured way to identify skill gaps across Product, Marketing, and Technology departments. With real data on where gaps existed and how significant they were, L&D programs could be targeted at the people who needed them rather than run as a broadcast. That shift from assumption-based to data-driven development is what drove the 82% increase in participation.

“Testlify streamlined everything, from screening to communication, and their team is always quick to deliver new features or improvements. It has made a big difference to our hiring.”

Andrei Ivanov
Training Coordinator, inDrive

Results

Hiring that took 3 weeks now takes 1. Development programs that ran blind now run on data.

The hiring team went from spending 85% of their effort on manual evaluations to running a fully automated screening process. Recruiters became 4x more efficient. Quality of hire improved by 40%, measured by better role fit among candidates who came through the structured process. On the L&D side, participation rose 82% as programs became targeted rather than generic, and employees engaged with development that was relevant to their actual gaps.