HackerRank’s technical recruiting platform assesses software developers’ actual coding skills to match them with the right job

HackerRank, a technical recruiting platform, was the first ever Indian startup to be enrolled into Y-Combinator‘s incubation programme in 2012. Started in 2010 by Vivek Ravisankar and Harishankaran K when technical recruiting was still an alien concept, HackerRank is on a mission to match every developer in the world with the right job. This is done by providing a technical recruiting platform that assesses developers based on actual coding skills. It is basically a platform for the best developers to hone their skills and for companies to find top software developers.

Since its inception, the company has been steadily growing by partnering with different enterprises from different industries. As of today, the firm is working with over 1,500 enterprises across industries to help them find out and recruit the best talent in the industry.

HackerRank — which has so far raised US$27.9 million from leading VCs including Recruit Holdings, Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures — has a fair presence in Southeast Asia as well, and is now for aggressive growth in this geography.

e27 recently caught up with HackerRank Co-founder and CTO Harishankaran K to know more about the firm’s future plans.

Edited excerpts are below:

You are the first ever Indian startup to be selected for Y-Combinator, but you have been maintaining a very low profile. Any particular reason for that?

Are you familiar with the concept of the Hidden Champion? So, basically what happens is that the most noise is created by the B2C companies. Their end consumers are basically everyone. But in our case, we deal with the sensitive area of hiring so we can’t reveal much about it. We are what you would define as a hidden champion.

So, companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel need the right talent and for that you have HackerRank. So HackerRank fits into every company’s agenda. We cater to every single company rather than every single consumer out there. Because of that there will definitely be a low profile but we have made an impact where it needs to be.

You started in 2010 when technical recruitment was an unheard-of thing. And even after eight years, the concept has not gained enough attention. Why so?

We see a good progress in technical recruiting, not too sure why you would assume there is not much awareness. The problem is that the whole part of this recruitment has a lot of manual work. People go with their own judgement rather than relying on data. We are trying to help companies make data-focused decisions.

For example, if a candidate comes for an interview, I may like the person but the other interviewer may not, and the word “like” is very subjective. Generally, when companies want to hire for a technical role, it is ideal to make data-based decisions. We help companies make data-focussed decisions, and there has been an upward trend in the sense that the companies working with us are seeing the benefits in each skillset they hire for in terms of how good the candidate is.

Rather than saying that I don’t like this person in technology A or technology B, it is now where the person stands in technology A and where he stands in technology B and all of this is because of the code they write. When we started out in the industry there was a lot of subjectivity, and we have changed that. Every company is now a tech company and they all need tech talent. So, there is enough awareness in the industry. What was lacking before is objectivity in tech recruiting. We at HackerRank have brought objectivity in recruiting.

Is there enough awareness among students and software coders about tech recruiting?

With respect to students, there is a gap in terms of what the industry requires, especially because of the curriculum and the teaching. You are expected to solve in C++ or java but there are many other technologies you can learn. The college curriculum has not caught up with this. Whatever I used to read eight to ten years back is still being taught; college students are still learning that.

The tech industry changes so rapidly. Having the same syllabus for 10 years stagnates the students, and this affects tech recruiting when these students try to look for a job. But there are some colleges that are different and better than others. They are teaching Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Open Source. However, we are noticing some changes and students coming out of these colleges are ready for the software industry, but there is a lot more that can be done there. It may not be 100 per cent perfect but it is going in the right direction.

Does lack of education have anything to do with quality of education as well?

When I say quality of education is not up to that, I mean the breadth of what is being taught is not alone enough to make the candidate industry ready. Universities should adopt competitive programming modules. They should encourage students to be part of programming communities where they can learn something beyond what is being taught to them in classes. Some colleges are already trying to bridge this gap by using HackerRank. Many universities in India have partnered with us. Students have to take the initiative, go out there and learn

You are working with some foreign universities and educational institutions. Do you work with their Indian peers, as well? 

Yes, we do work with universities in India, as well. We are working with three to four universities here. They reached out to us to use our platform for upskilling their candidates. And we gave the platform free for universities. Any college can use the platform for free, give challenges to them and ask them to solve this and get better at programming skills.

Having said that, we can’t proactively go to colleges and ask them to use HackerRank. With companies it is different. They trust us, our platform, content, and scoring mechanism. We can’t go out of the way to help colleges and tell them this is what the students should train on — our credibility sort of takes a hit there. But if colleges want to use our platform, we certainly help them there.

Universities have started seeing the need for their students to be more able to solve programming challenges. There is an organisation in Telangana called the Telangana Association of Skill and Knowledge. Basically, what they do is bolster the employability of students in Telagana state. They saw HackerRank and signed an MoU with us, which will enable any university under TASK to enrol on to HackerRank, solve challenges on the platform and boost their overall employability. We are taking steps in the right direction but we cant really proactively go to universities and ask them to sign up with us because that affects our credibility.

Your primary market has always been the US. Where does India stand in the overall pie, in terms of revenue, and traction?

Pretty much a large chunk of it is from the US. There is an equal level of interest being given in India, as well. We have captured a large amount of the market in India and will continue to expand.

India and the US have been our primary markets. But we do have a substantial amount of customers in Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe. We even have an office in London. We are growing fast. It is no longer just India and the US for HackerRank. We are pretty much a go-to company globally. We are taking small steps but will become the number one company for tech recruiting very soon.

Can you give me a percentage of revenue breakup that comes from US, Asia, Europe, etc.

We won’t be able to disclose revenue figures.

What is your go-to market strategy? Are they different for different markets?

I wouldn’t say it is quite different. Our strategies are similar when it comes to the US as well as India. The value of the product remains the same whether you are selling it in India or elsewhere. We have a very big target audience — engineers and recruiters who want to hire.

Initially, it was through word of mouth and now we have an active marketing, we have plenty of online presence with more customers on board. The key aim is to make sure the product has a mix of right elements in it that will give an engineer the best experience as well as a recruiter to make sure the best candidate gets hired.

Are you targeting only technology companies or other sectors as well?

Every company today is a tech company. Every sector has tech requirement and every company is becoming a tech company. If you ask me who does not need tech talent I wouldn’t know what to say.

Some companies still rely on platforms like LinkedIn for finding talent. Are you looking to partner with LinkedIn or become like it so that you can cover that element as well

LinkedIn has partnered with us. There is this thing called LinkedIn for placements for which they have partnered with HackerRank. So basically anybody who applies for a tech job through LinkedIn placement has to go through HackerRank’s tests.

Is it an official partnership?

Yes, it is an official partnership. LinkedIn and HackerRank cater to two different kinds of talent aspirations. LinkedIn has profiles of all the users, recruiters can look at these and make a judgement based on that. HackerRank is a bit different and has taken it to the next level. With HackerRank, recruiters on LinkedIn can actually invite candidates to take the tests and judge them based on skill. It is a very logical second step for LinkedIn. They have job openings on LinkedIn, they have profile, they can take tests on HackerRank

Regarding competition, HackerEarth is one of your competitions and it recently shifted their focus to talent management and hackathons. What is your mission going forward?

Our mission has always been to connect every developer with the right job irrespective of which college they are from or which degree they hold and help companies do skill based hiring. This has been the same irrespective of what others are doing. This is our basic focus. Whether you are from an IIT or tier II or tier III college, if you have the right skillsets, you should be able to get the right job. For this, if we have to do hackathons, we do it. Or if we have to focus on more assessments.

Your focus has always been technical recruitment, but there is a huge gap in other domains. Will you cater to that by launching a new platform in the near future?

Not really. There is so much more to be done on the technical platform itself. If you take an engineer, every year there are new roles coming up for engineers. Three years ago or even six years ago, there was not a lot happening on Machine Learning or Data Science Learning as today. Right now outside technical recruitment, we don’t have much focus

AI is one of the hottest and sought-after technologies today. Are you looking to add a bot or deep learning capability to your platform going forward which makes recruiting or communication between the recruiter and the recruit easier?

Yes we do want to add that — we are working on those as we speak and there are two ways in which we can add this. The first one, which we already have, is that as of today, any company which is hiring Machine Learning or AI talent can use our platform to give real world challenges which covers these topics.

If I have to start up someone on the Machine Learning skills, I can use HackerRank to send them a test which has challenges pertaining to Machine Learning and see how good they are in those domains. This is already in place and companies are using this for their hiring purposes. The second part is where HackerRank itself uses more Machine Learning and the platform becomes smarter and smarter and is able to recommend the right candidate, the right question, right challenge. There are some pieces where we have introduced this and will be working more on that.

As for VC funding, your latest funding happened back in 2015 which, was led by Recruit Holdings. Why did you go for a Japanese investor? Was it meant for expansion to the Japanese market

There are two aspects to this. One is to understand the industry better and we wanted to be connected to someone. It was a part of our strategy, other places they don’t know how the recruitment industry is moving along. We felt the right way to get them involved in the growth of our company. Recruit is massive in Japan, and they did connect us with folks there and we are working with them.

You are backed by some of the leading VCs. Are you looking to raise more for funding for expansion and growth?

At this point, it’s growth of customers. We have enough buffer to take care of our expenses for a while. When we say growth, it’s the growth of programmers and customers. When we get more customers, we are able to get more revenue out of them. It is not a B2C scenario where you keep on pouring money and after a long time you will see responses.

You are sitting on a huge pile of data. How are you going to make the most of it?

The motto of our company is to match every developer with a job; we will be using this to our benefit. By analysing the data, we are able to tell the company about certain key insight that we could identify. By using these insights companies are being able to hire more accurately that will ultimately meet business objective of the company.

What are your plans for the markets in Southeast Asia? Are you looking to expand in terms of partnering with companies?

We do have substantial presence in these market, but currently the operations are handled out of Bangalore. Whenever required we do travel to these countries for work. But yes, we are looking to expand our business in Southeast Asia as well

Currently, you are monetising only recruiters. Are you going to change this strategy going forward?

Our current strategy is working out well for us. It is a model that has worked out for us globally. We do not perceive any change in this going forward.

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The post Technical recruiting platforms are the need of the hour; Every business is now a tech company, says Harishankaran K of HackerRank appeared first on e27.