More than 6000 people, ranging from developers to hiring managers to HR professionals, registered for our annual HackerRank.main() virtual event yesterday—making HackerRank.main() 2020 the largest event we’ve ever hosted. 

The two-hour virtual event boasted discussions with thought leaders from ServiceNow, Salesforce, UBS, and Mathworks, and unveiled the fourth pillar within the Developer Skills Platform: Rank. 

This final pillar allows companies to benchmark candidates against millions of developers so hiring managers feel more confident when hiring remote technical talent—making the Developer Skills Platform a single source of truth for remote, end-to-end tech hiring.

 

Watch the virtual event on-demand here or keep reading for highlights & takeaways.

 

Keynote: Skills Mapping for Valid & Fair Tech Hiring

We kicked off the virtual event with a panel discussion led by Dr. Fred Rafilson, Chief I/O Psychologist at HackerRank, and Kesha Williams, Software Engineer and Karthik Gaekwad, Principal Engineer. Together, they discussed standardized skills and how to get the most out of your hiring process. 

Key Takeaways:

• Pull from your own experience when building a standardized skills rubric.
• When defining role requirements, work with the stakeholders to understand the expectations of what you might want the role to actually fill.
• Understanding the needs of the project helps you define the type of role you’re looking for.

The Developer Skills Platform in Action

The moment you’ve all been waiting for… the big reveal of the Developer Skills Platform! We unveiled how to optimize hiring in a remote with a demo of the Developer Skills Platform. 

What is the Developer Skills Platform? 

We’re glad you asked! The Developer Skills Platform is the first end-to-end solution for remote tech hiring. 

It provides a seamless experience for hiring managers and candidates so the remote interview process is easy, efficient, and effective. Remote work and hiring remote workers is the future of innovation for many companies and embracing an end-to-end solution for remote technical hiring will allow organizations to scale quickly and innovate faster while tapping into a more diverse talent pool. 

The Developer Skills Platform is designed around the four core phases of the hiring process:

1. Plan: Define the skills required for the role that you are filling from the industry-standard skills directory detailing proficiency levels for 15 in-demand technical roles mapped to 75+ skills. Work with HackerRank engagement experts to clearly define a standard process to assess the necessary skills across each phase of the screen and interview process. 
2. Screen: Accelerate resume review and enable high-quality candidates to showcase their coding skills with assessments and real-world projects before the interview.
3. Interview: Conduct real-time, real-world technical interviews from anywhere.
4. Rank: Identify the best candidates based on assessing the right skills, not pedigree. Compare skills to other candidates for the position, as well as millions of developers worldwide. Continuously improve interviewers by comparing evaluations. Standardized process and scoring to ensure a fair evaluation.

“The launch of the Developer Skills platform is the culmination of a decade’s worth of experience. We started out as an assessment platform and as we’ve grown, we’ve continually iterated on our product to meet the needs of our 2000+ customers,” said Vivek Ravisankar, Co-Founder and CEO of HackerRank. 

“Now that the world has shifted to remote work, it’s imperative that companies embrace an end-to-end approach when hiring technical talent. The Developer Skills Platform allows companies to standardize and scale their hiring processes and is perfectly suited for our remote lives.” 

Tick Tock Talks: End-to-End Technical Hiring, Uncovering Best Practices in a Remote World

ServiceNow

First, we spoke with Nancy DeLeon, Global TA Director at ServiceNow. She discussed the importance of implementing diversity and inclusion efforts as well as how they successfully leveraged HackerRank in reducing the engineering resource needed to hire while ensuring the candidate skillset remained at a high bar.      

Key Takeaways: 

• “Treat people beautifully.” Have those tough conversations and host D&I trainings that ignite change not just within your teams, but outwardly across the community.
• Having an end-to-end platform improves the quality of the tests as well as the candidate experience.
• Hiring automation in high-volume areas helps you find the quality talent, reduce time to hire, and anticipate attrition in real time.
• Give candidates the tools they need to succeed. Invest in candidates who may not have passed the first time but who are interested in your brand by providing them with resources to improve and possibly get hired in the future. 

Mathworks

Next, we spoke with Vipresh Gangwhal, Engineering Development Group Manager at MathWorks, about how his team rapidly transitioned from nearly no one working remotely, to 100% remote hiring using HackerRank. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Having the right technology in place makes it easier to pivot in times of crisis.
• Automation makes it easy to adapt to the remote world—building human connections is the hard part.
• Build a diverse candidate pool and create an interview process that removes implicit biases.
• You need multiple data points to evaluate talent—the Screen is just one data point.
• From sourcing to interviewing, to starting the onboarding process, having the right expertise partnership in place fosters transparency so different teams can work with each other to hire the right candidate.

Salesforce

Then, we talked with Tim Ahern, Recruiting Leader of Engineering and Technology at Salesforce, about how he identified core competencies that map to what a successful candidate looks like, without implicit biases.

Key Takeaways: 

• Structure leads to alignment and consistencies that help scale your business and turn on a dime. (Salesforce pivoted to fully remote interviewing in 7 days.) 
• “Screen people in instead of screening people out.”
• Having buy-in from executives early on (like a HackerRank Advisory Board) helps push decisions and changes through the organization.

UBS

Lastly, we spoke with David O’Brien, Group Technology Workforce Management at UBS, about how standardizing skillsets helped his team easily pivot into remote hiring across the globe. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Understand what the technology can offer you, and rebuild and redefine the recruitment process from there.
• Standardizing skills globally leads to greater flexibility, higher quality, and a more diverse talent pool.
• Invest in a tech council. Having the technologist drive the content fosters greater appreciation for candidates.
• Don’t just discover new ways of processing candidates. Learn how to attract them to your organization.
• Reimagine the entire process—think beyond automating your current paper process.

See you in 2021!

We’re thrilled with the outcome of our first virtual HackerRank.main() event and already receiving requests to attend next year. If you’re interested in learning more about the Developer Skills Platform, click here.