For teams hiring developers, remote hiring is more than the new normal; it’s the future of hiring. With employees working remotely across the world, the ability to effectively identify, screen, interview, and select candidates from afar is now non-negotiable.
At HackerRank, we’ve been making significant improvements to our platform to help our customers do just that. Over the last few months, we’ve built a number of enhancements designed to help our customers effectively assess developer skills from anywhere. It’s since become the backbone of hiring processes at Bloomberg, Atlassian, Elastic, and more.
With these improvements, we’re excited to launch our end-to-end remote hiring solution.
Introducing the HackerRank remote hiring solution
At HackerRank, we’ve powered more than 92 million assessments for our customers. On average, that’s one assessment taken every eight seconds across our 2,000+ global customers—many of whom have been historically remote-first.
We’ve synthesized our takeaways from those experiences—along with expertise from industry experts—to create our remote hiring solution. The result is a remote hiring solution that our customers can trust to consistently surface best-fit candidates.
It consists of four core elements designed to correlate to each step in the hiring process: defining role requirements, screening for best-fit candidates, interviewing late-stage candidates, and scoring frontrunners.
Here’s how HackerRank’s remote hiring solution supports customers hiring remotely at every stage of the process:
Defining role requirements
Defining skill requirements is one of the earliest (and one of the most important) steps in the hiring process. A well-documented, standardized hiring process is key to making unbiased hiring decisions. It’s also key to aligning remote interviewers on the skills to evaluate in the hiring process.
To support this step of the process, we’ve created the HackerRank Skills Directory, a library of in-demand technical skills and key competencies validated by a panel of industry experts. It includes 60+ skills—like React, .NET, and AWS—and the key competencies that define basic to advanced mastery in each.
But each technical role comes with its own mix of skill requirements. So to help teams define expected skills and competencies for each role, we’ve also created a set of 15+ unique technical roles in the platform. Each role is mapped to a set of skills in the directory that define success in that role. It makes it easier for teams to align on objective, skill-based evaluations with less effort.
Screening for best-fit candidates
Once the team defines skill requirements, screening your candidate pool helps to determine which of your candidates have the prerequisite skills to be successful in the role. In a remote setting, that comes down to assessing candidates’ abilities in relevant skills at scale—and asynchronously.
Within the HackerRank remote hiring solution, we’ve simplified candidate screening through our new skills-based experience. Through the new skills-based experience, customers can now generate pre-built tests for 15+ unique technical roles: from data scientist to back-end developer, to cloud engineer, and more.
Each pre-built test includes a curated set of questions, selected to effectively assess the skills associated with the role. It makes it easier for teams to create effective, tailored tests that generate meaningful insights around candidate skills. And since candidates complete tests on their own time, there’s no need to schedule real-time screening calls, freeing remote teams to practice asynchronous workflows.
Interviewing promising candidates
That same skills-based experience tracks into the interview stage of the remote hiring solution. Using CodePair* teams can conduct effective remote technical interviews aligned to the skills associated with the role at hand. It helps give interviewers a simple way to capture feedback during the interview and to focus their feedback on the key skills for the role.
To enable this, we’ve added tailored interviewer scorecards into CodePair*. Each interviewer in CodePair* is now prompted to score the candidate against the same consistent set of key skills. We’ve also introduced a curated set of recommended interview questions, each with built-in interviewer guidelines. Interviewer guidelines—like hints, pseudo-code, and potential follow-up questions—help the interviewer to conduct more consistent, informed interviews without intensive prep.
CodePair* continues to evolve to handle every type of technical interview round. To make it easier to conduct those interviews from afar, we’ve also introduced virtual whiteboarding: an intuitive, collaborative online whiteboard that’s available in every CodePair* session. Using the virtual whiteboard, teams can pose system design questions, collaborate on simple UI sketches, and visualize programming concepts with the candidate.
Scoring frontrunner candidates
The remote hiring solution culminates in the scoring stage, where we’ve introduced the candidate summary packet: a collection of test scores, panel feedback, and code artifacts gathered from each stage of the process.
To help hiring managers create skills-based hiring decisions, the candidate packet is organized by the same set of skills assessed in the screening and interview stages. The candidate’s performance is summarized by the core skills associated with the role at hand. Each skill contains summaries of panel feedback, plus scores on relevant test questions.
By collecting each piece of data from the hiring process into one cohesive candidate summary, hiring managers can get a birds-eye view of the candidate’s abilities in each skill area. It helps hiring managers make their hiring decisions based on the skill criteria specified for the role—versus more freeform debriefs and candidate discussions. The technical debrief can now take place in this packet, with the opportunity to view and replay coding challenges, which are now just one click away.
Creating an effective remote hiring process
The success of a remote hiring process is dependent on the ability to connect candidates and hiring teams from afar and to align hiring teams around a unified rubric of required skills. We’re excited to introduce the HackerRank remote hiring solution to help hiring teams identify, screen, interview, and select candidates from anywhere.
To try HackerRank’s remote hiring solution, sign up for a free trial below.
*Disclaimer: This blog post contains messaging around the "CodePair" and "CodeScreen" features which are now called "Interview" within the HackerRank product as of 10/06/20.
Dan Somrack is the Senior Director of Product Management at HackerRank. As leader of the HackerRank for Work team, Dan is passionate about crafting seamless, effective end-to-end hiring experiences. He uses his combined background across computer science, product, and engineering to help customers spend less time on hiring—and more time innovating. Dan has previously worked at Microsoft, AtHoc, Blackberry, and has served as an advisor to several early startups.