We have seen a shift of pattern in the recruitment industry in the last few years. We recently wrote about the data driven recruitment
startup Belong, and now meet
HackerRank that focuses on technical recruitment but in a unique way. The advent of technology has ensured that every company requires some form of tech backing and the demand for programmers has started to come from unexpected quarters. HackerRank offers platforms for both technical evaluations and solving programming challenges, disrupting the hiring pattern in the coding industry.
It was founded by college buddies and graduates of Computer Science from National Institute of Technology Trichy – Harishankaran Karunanidhi and Vivek Ravisankar in 2009. In the bid to find a solution to flaws in traditional recruitment process, the duo built the startup to make hiring more transparent, simple, effective and efficient.
“Tech recruitment on campus was previously a manual affair and was done through pen and paper coding tests. This would be okay if there were perhaps 10 students on campus taking the assessment. But that’s never the case. There’s almost always atleast 200 students appearing for a campus test and correcting code manually without even the ability to compile it was a tedious and time consuming affair, not to mention extremely error-prone,” Harishankaran said.
HackerRank has managed to create a blooming community with close to 1.5 million developers, and drives student engagement on 150+ Indian campuses which include all top tier engineering colleges. Apart from that, there is HackerRank for enterprise, a B2B offering called HackerRank for Work. The company is associated with some big names including Adobe, Amazon, Accenture, Snapdeal, Flipkart, InMobi, Juniper, LinkedIn, Target, Practo, KLA-Tencor, Cisco, Symantec, Microsoft, Citrix, Xerox, NIIT, Sapient. Moreover, LinkedIn recently partnered with HackerRank for their LinkedIn Placements portal where any candidate looking to apply for a tech position in any company has to go through a challenge on HackerRank. More than 150,000 engineering students appear for campus placements yearly assessed by companies through HackerRank.
Apart from challenges supported by organisations or directed by HackerRank itself that let applicants demonstrate their abilities regardless of a degree from a top tier college, it also has products like CodePair and
HackerRank Jobs to assist in the process of hiring.
“The company is more enterprise-focused and the offerings are built to scale. With an ever-growing engineering team and a programmer-oriented approach to product development, HackerRank has proven to be a game changer in technical assessments. Besides, with a community of over 1.5 million developers worldwide, HackerRank offers an attractive proposition to companies looking to tap into that massive talent pool. HackerRank is also known for its intuitive UI and relatively hassle-free and intuitive user experience,” explains Harishankaran.
HackerRank works on a licensing model. So, a license entitles a recruiter to invite a fixed number of candidates to take up a test on HackerRank annually. In 2014 , HackerRank received a $9.2 million Series B funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures. It was followed by $7.5 million (Rs. 47 crore) funds from a Japanese human resources company Recruit Holding. It is also backed by investors like Vinod Khosla and Y Combinator.
