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HackerRank Unveils New Ability to Assess DevOps Skills in Interviews

Written By James Voytek | April 21, 2022

Assessing DevOps Skills in Interviews

58% of Tech Leaders Say Hiring Skilled DevOps Engineers is a Huge Challenge

The software development industry is drastically changing. Engineering teams must continuously deploy applications at a faster rate – and they are confronted with dynamic infrastructure environments and constantly changing requirements from customers. The global DevOps market size is projected to increase from $6.78 billion to $57.90 billion over the next decade. As a result, more and more companies are hiring DevOps engineers to streamline the process of software application development.

Rapid growth in the DevOps market makes it increasingly difficult for companies to hire skilled DevOps engineers. A report from the DevOps Institute found that 58 percent of tech leaders said DevOps hiring is a huge challenge. Specifically, companies need to effectively assess DevOps skills during interviews to avoid losing thousands of dollars by making a bad hire. With this context in mind, HackerRank has introduced a new feature that allows hiring teams to assess DevOps skills during interviews through real-time collaboration on job-specific challenges.

Work Collaboratively on DevOps Interview Questions

In addition to technical assessments for DevOps candidates, HackerRank now empowers interviewers to collaborate on a variety of standardized or custom DevOps questions with candidates during interviews. By working collaboratively, the interviewer gains a deeper understanding of how the candidate thinks about challenges they might face in the job.

For example, the interviewer can ask the candidate to talk through the problem as they work toward a solution and assess the candidate’s knowledge, approach, and thought process. After the interview, the hiring team can review the candidate’s responses and have more insights to inform their hiring decision, extending beyond the candidate’s ability to come up with the correct solution.

Catch Every Keystroke With a Shared Terminal and Session Recordings

HackerRank’s in-browser terminal enables candidates to work on DevOps tasks during interviews and shows interviewers all of the changes the candidate makes in real time. Furthermore, the entire session is recorded — and the hiring team can access the recording anytime from interview reports. These recordings help hiring teams compare and rank candidates to ensure they make the best hiring decision. 

Interviewers can easily start a DevOps interview by simply clicking the DevOps tile as featured in the image below: 

HackerRank DevOps Tile

Choose Your DevOps Interview Question

After clicking the DevOps tile, users have two options. They can build a question from scratch to utilize a bash shell terminal on an Ubuntu server and work on a diverse set of tasks during the interview, or they can import one or more DevOps questions from the HackerRank library

Each DevOps question is deployed on a separate Amazon EC2 instance and includes packages and libraries configured for that question. Neither the terminal nor the server is shared between any two questions. 

Do It Yourself

Interviewers can build a custom challenge that is tailored to a problem the candidate may encounter on the job with the “Start from Scratch” option. Building a custom question can give the hiring team additional opportunities to assess the relevant skills a DevOps engineer will need to be successful at the hiring company.

In the graphic below, we’ve provided a demonstration of an interviewer selecting the “Start from Scratch” option when setting up an interview.

Animation of the start from scratch option

Import Questions From the HackerRank Library

For users who prefer to rely on pre-built DevOps questions, HackerRank provides a robust library of test questions to choose from. Users can import a pre-built question, or previously saved custom problem, from the HackerRank library and dive right into interviewing candidates.

See what happens when a user selects “Import Question from Library” in the animation below:

Animation of the import question from library option

Evaluate DevOps Candidates With a Free Trial to HackerRank Interviews

Software development is becoming more complex, so companies must hire skilled DevOps engineers to streamline software development. That’s why HackerRank rolled out DevOps skills assessments for interviews.

If you’re ready to improve your ability to evaluate DevOps candidates, start your free trial to HackerRank today, or read more about using DevOps interview questions in this support article.