Sachin Gupta

Few people know this, but Vivek and I began working on HackerEarth even before we graduated. Specifically, we were working on MyCareerStack, and several elements from that time laid the foundation for what would become HackerEarth.

I moved to Bangalore in July 2012 to work at Google. Three months later, we were accepted into GSF Accelerator and officially started HackerEarth in November 2012.

From the very beginning, we’ve been a design-focused company. Our design may not have always been flashy, but it’s always been simple and functional.

While many startups invest heavily in branding early on, we chose a different path. For the first three years, we consciously delayed creating a brand identity or a logo for HackerEarth.

Of course, we did need a logo when starting out—for startup competitions, visiting cards, T-shirts, and laptops. So we created a simple one:

It was straightforward: our name in a nice font on a background we liked. It served its purpose well and became recognizable.

We delayed creating a new identity mainly because we were still discovering who we were. The first three years were filled with exploration, pivots, and growth. We needed that time to truly understand our purpose.

Today, I’m proud to say that we’ve reached a point where our identity is clear. And interestingly, it aligns perfectly with what we started with: a platform for developers who love to code. These two elements have always been at the core of HackerEarth, and nothing represents that better than our new logo.

We’ve made a few changes—dropped camel case, moved away from a standard font, and created a custom typeface that’s more casual and fun. The standout is the redesigned ‘h’, which embodies the spirit of a programmer: code.

If that isn’t clear, take a look here:

The ‘h’ stands for “hacker,” the first half of our name and the core of our community. Hackers are builders, challengers, and lifelong learners. Every HackerEarth user is a hacker at heart.

The little underscore below the ‘h’ symbolizes the blinking cursor from a console—the same one you see when you code. It’s familiar, iconic, and deeply personal to every programmer. Our logo reflects the playground of a hacker.

This logo is our declaration: HackerEarth is a platform for hackers, built by hackers. We are passionate about code, about writing better code, and about becoming better programmers—every single day.

The race for qualified talent is on. As your digital transformation journey continues, it's important that your new hires have the skills necessary to integrate into a growing and changing organization. Tech giants with the resources to offer competitive salaries and hardy benefits packages make it more difficult for smaller organizations to recruit and retain excellent candidates.

Core technical competencies are necessary to ensure your candidates’ success in their new role, but be mindful that an aptitude for learning is equally important for employee growth. By focusing your hiring efforts around learning and other soft skills, acknowledging that additional technical experiences can be gained on the job, you ensure that you are hiring malleable candidates with strong foundational skills. Here are three skills required for successful digital transformation and how to hire for them.

Top skills to prioritize for digital transformation in 2022

Critical Thinking

Assessing critical thinking skills should be among the top priorities when hiring, for a few reasons. Largely, critical thinking is among the most sought-after candidate qualities, but also among the hardest to find. It is also cited as one of the most difficult skills to teach and cultivate within the workplace. Industry-specific hard skills are teachable through training and onboarding programs, while critical thinking can take much longer to improve. Choose to prioritize critical thinking skills when evaluating potential candidates.

First-round interviews are an excellent time to assess an applicant’s high-level thinking. To evaluate the way your potential employee evaluates information, processes it, and provides meaningful, strategic solutions, ask multipart questions. For example, Harvard Business Review suggests asking a candidate, “When you are working on a strategic project in your current job, how do you go about identifying the relevant stakeholders across the firm?” Questions like these give you insight into how a candidate thinks about a problem and whether or not they would be a good fit for your organization’s work environment.

As you search for critical thinkers, look beyond traditional backgrounds or areas of study. Be open to a diverse set of applicants that may surprise you with the way they approach a challenge.

Adaptability

Similar to critical thinking, candidates that are highly adaptable are valuable to organizations that are amidst a process change. Adaptability is important for digital transformation as companies transition from remote to hybrid and in-person work, for succeeding on a flexible team, and for growing and expanding as roles evolve.

Three things can help you as a hiring manager to screen for adaptability among applicants:

• First, ask the right interview questions. Questions that simultaneously assess how candidates have performed in previous roles while also prompting them to show some personality can help you thoughtfully evaluate if they are adaptable or not.
• Second, look for calmness and confidence during the interview. Candidates who have trouble collecting themselves under pressure won’t be the most adaptable in a high-stakes work environment.
• Finally, set the right expectations for what the first months will look like in this role. The more you can prepare your applicants upfront, the better they will be able to navigate the changes that come.

Teamwork, Collaboration, and Communication

As your organization grows, accountability is important. Both in taking responsibility for your actions (good and bad) and supporting your team members through adversity. Seek to hire team members who can be successful as team leaders and followers—working in whatever role advances the team’s goal most efficiently.

To gauge the collaborative skills of your potential new hires, take the time to speak with candidates' references. Specifically, come with a set of questions that goes beyond the basics. Ask previous employers explicit questions like, “how does candidate X respond to constructive criticism?” or “what is candidate X’s strongest attribute when it comes to working on a team?”

Finally, giving potential candidates the opportunity to meet with as many members of the team as possible can ensure that strong relationships begin to form even during the interview process. Your trusted team members may uncover red flags you hadn’t seen previously or help move the needle on a candidate you were apprehensive about.

With open communication, you can build teams that will develop with your organization as it grows—furthering your digital transformation journey.

According to a slightly dated but still relevant research, top performers are 400% more productive than average workers in an organization. For a SaaS company, these “10x developers” could very well be responsible for accomplishing about 80% of the work your team gets done.

Skilled developers are hard to find as is. So, when you have heavy lifters in your team, it’s important to give them every opportunity to grow and enhance their skill set; thereby helping your business in the long run. One of the ways you can do this is through ingraining a continuous skill assessment process into your work day.

Yes, you already did a skill assessment when hiring your team.

However, it shouldn’t just stop there.

Let me tell you why. According to a 2018 McKinsey Global Institute report, as many as 375 million workers (approximately 14% of the global workforce) will have to change by 2030 because of digital transformation, automation, and advancements in Artificial Intelligence.

This rapid rate of tech advancement has opened up a ‘skill gap’ in our industry. Businesses are looking to predict upcoming needs and trends and be product-ready for the future, but they are working with teams that are not equipped to handle these demands. Many companies focus on hiring developers who can fill an immediate gap, rather than on people they can develop over the course of a career. Add to this the demands of a rapidly changing workplace and further gaps soon appear.

This skill gap, if left unchecked, can cause:

• A loss in productivity across your tech teams
• A higher rate of attrition among your top developers
• Lowered employee morale
• A dip in work quality
• Roadblocks in business expansion
• An inevitable loss of revenue

When you extrapolate these problems out across the entire tech industry, the issues become even more significant. Talent shortages caused by the skill gap could become widespread, recruiters would have a hard time finding role-specific personnel, and most importantly; there could also be a lack of skilled managers to train novice team members. Building future-ready teams in the present would then just be a pipe dream.

Currently, most companies fix this skill gap short term by outsourcing or hiring more contract/temporary workers. This is, however, not a strategic long-term solution. The better practice is to hire good developers and help them grow and adapt to changing business needs through constant learning and development.

Research shows that companies that invest in L&D see a 10% increase in their employees’ productivity. Upskilling teams is also considerably more cost-effective than replacing members with new hires. Apart from providing high quality learning content a critical step in creating an efficient L&D program is identifying the existing skill gap in your organization, and monitoring employee progress on a regular basis. This is where continuous skill assessment comes into play.

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Suggested Reading: Building Future-Ready Tech Teams

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Continuous skill assessment can amplify L&D.

Skill assessment can add to your organization’s learning and improvement program. When used properly, it’ll help you provide constant feedback on your team’s progress and problems, and intervene in a timely manner where needed.

[caption id="attachment_30994" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] 4 key reasons to implement continuous skill assessment for your tech team[/caption]



With a well-structured continuous skill assessment process, you can easily:

• Define and create a skills inventory for your team
  Begin by defining competencies needed for each job, or job family. Using a standardized framework will help you search and analyze the data to determine staff and skills gaps.
• Assign individuals to teams or projects based on knowledge and skill set
  IBM has a tool called Talent Match that allows leaders to identify employees with specific verified skills. A similar skills inventory for your workplace can help you put your best developer on the job every single time and get the best ROI for your effort.
• Create a learning culture
  With the skills inventory in place, you can support a continuous learning culture in your organization where employees, managers, and teams are individually, and collectively, responsible for seeking out the knowledge or skills required. In addition, knowledge and skills are shared among teams, coaching and mentoring is done easily, and the end result is a more agile organization.
• Guard against groupthink
  It is vital that members have formal structured learning so that everyone in the team has the scope and depth of skills needed to support each other’s work. This diversity in knowledge and expertise also has another benefit. It guards against groupthink which can very easily lead your team down the wrong path.

None of this, however, is a one-time activity.

Technology and related business needs are always changing, so it is important your skills inventory, and the skill assessment process also is adaptive.

I recommend leaders use an iterative approach to maintaining a continuous skill assessment program. For instance, skill competency reviews can be done in tandem with performance review cycles, thereby ensuring that teams are up to date with business requirements. This will also provide a better benchmark to adjust the skill assessment if so needed.

Keeping pace in a rapidly evolving world requires a workforce that is nimble, and can quickly identify the right skills and the people who possess them. This can only be done with a structured, standardized, and continuous model of skill evaluation and development.

As someone wisely said, innovation comes with learning, right?

Baking a cake requires four basic ingredients. Eggs, flour, sugar, and butter. Get the proportions of any of these ingredients wrong and you will have a lumpy, soggy mass of wetness that is nowhere near yum.

I like to think of the process of building great tech teams as baking cakes. You have four important parts of the process: Attract and Source, Assessments, Interview, Upskilling, and Engagement. Get any of these wrong and what you end up with is talent unfit for your present business requirements, and unprepared for future challenges.

For the last eight years, we at HackerEarth have perfected every single part of this process. What we have for you now is a cake suite of products and solutions carefully designed to optimize your tech hiring, and select the right talent for every role.

Presenting: HackerEarth for Enterprises.

Why a suite?

HackerEarth for Enterprises is the tech industry’s first comprehensive platform that unites every step of the tech employee lifecycle from engaging, sourcing, hiring, and upskilling developer and data science talent. Our solution provides full visibility across multiple teams within an organization to track the skills and progress of a developer as they move through the employee lifecycle and mature their capabilities over time.

The benefits of using HackerEarth for Enterprises

1. Attract and source:
   

   We’ve talked about how tech hiring takes time. What makes it worse is the fact that top talent usually stays on the market for just about 10 days. You have a very small window of opportunity to attract the best devs from the time a hiring requirement comes up. With HackerEarth’s customized hackathons, you can attract the right talent by boosting your tech employer brand as well as crowdsource innovation from the global developer pool. This not only widens your sourcing funnel, but also helps in strengthening your tech employer brand.
   
   We’ve also run thousands of hiring challenges for companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Thoughtworks - at both university level (for campus hiring/internship programs) as well as for lateral hiring. With a HackerEarth hiring challenge, you can source from our community of 5 million developers (and counting), and pick the best for your team.

2. Objective and automated assessments:

   Now that you’ve sourced, and chosen, the next step is to assess the developers for a skill fit. HackerEarth Assessments offers you a library of 20,000+ problem questions which you can use to create an assessment. With our platform, you can create your first assessment in under 5 mins based on role, skill, or even job description. If you want to, you also have the choice to create your own custom questions as well!
   
   This test can be mailed out to all developers you want to assess. With our robust proctoring features and benchmarked evaluations, you don’t have to toil through hours of code and manually assess every assignment. Objectivity and accuracy are guaranteed!
   
   The best part about HackerEarth Assessments is that it seamlessly integrates with top ATSs like Greenhouse, Workable, Taleo, JazzHR and more. In fact it’s super easy for us to integrate with your ATS even if we don’t support it out of the box. Having all the candidate data in a single place makes it easier to move through the steps easily and saves you the heartache of switching between multiple tools that probably don't talk to each other very well.
   
   Moreover, HackerEarth's Coding Assessments takes bias out of the process. Our built-in PII (Personal Identifiable Information) anonymizer feature lets you hide a candidate’s personal information like their name, gender, age etc., and instead places the spotlight dead center on their skills.

3. Skill-based and unbiased tech interviews:
   

   When we were building our interview platform FaceCode, we wanted to change the way tech interviews have been conducted for long. Here’s how our intelligent interviewing platform helps hiring managers:

• FaceCode helps you hire for skills. With FaceCode, hiring managers can ask questions in real-time and use pair programming during interviews. This way, candidates can showcase their coding skills in an environment they are familiar with, leaving very little room for jitters.

• FaceCode makes feedback so much easier: Last year we ran a survey to understand the various challenges recruiters face during hiring. About 20% of the recruiters working in enterprises said that feedback and communication was a hassle (the number ranges from 15-20% across industry sizes). With FaceCode, we have made feedback gathering a breeze - in fact, our platform can literally write the feedback for you!

4. Creating a future-ready tech team in the present:
   

   HackerEarth’s L&D platform helps you objectively assess your team and identify critical thinking and learning agility. Once these are defined, you can then curate learning pathways that will help your team grow and be ready for future challenges in the ‘now’. Constant evaluation and skill enhancement can ensure your tech team becomes future-proof, reduce your company’s tech debt, and create an equitable process for appraisals.
   
   With our internal hackathons, you can also keep your team engaged while working remotely. You can foster a culture of innovation in your organization by running a rapid prototyping sprint or solve core real-world customer challenges all while having a fun day at work.

So, are you suiting up for the suite?

The secret to making a good cake (what we started this post with) is getting the separate ingredients to mix together in the right proportions. Good things happen in the mixing bowl, as every baker worth their sea salt knows. HackerEarth for Enterprises suite is that mixing bowl.For far too long, we in the tech world have been running tech hiring in silos. A fragmented system where the assessment process has nothing to do with the skills required, or where the interviewer does not talk to the recruiter sourcing the candidates, obviously does not work. Hence, we decided to make life easier for recruiters and hiring managers by bringing the disparate processes together in one easy-to-use platform. #ComingTogetherAt HackerEarth, we have always aimed at making tech hiring fair and unprejudiced for developers, while not forgetting the troubles faced by recruiters and hiring managers across the globe. With this suite, we have managed to make the process seamless, intuitive, and intelligent, and ensured that both sides of the equation are equally benefited.

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If you’d like to take HackerEarth for Enterprises for a spin, do talk to us at support@hackerearth.com .

When the pandemic began, businesses were focused on putting their heads down and weathering an uncertain economic environment. For many, this meant a temporary freeze on hiring. As things thawed, hiring came back, but this time, it was virtual.

A Gartner poll found that “86% of organizations were incorporating new virtual technology to interview candidates” by the second month of the COVID-19 pandemic. This mad scramble to integrate new interviewing tools was, for some, disorienting. In tech hiring, it’s been a godsend. While we still appreciate face-to-face interaction, the digital nature of remote interviews comes with so many benefits that we won’t be doing whiteboard coding challenges with candidates ever again.Here are three reasons why:

1. Less work = More data

I work in tech, and I love data. Tech companies evangelize harvesting data wherever possible, but before the pandemic, interviews were a data dark spot. Most of the information conveyed lived either in the mind of the interviewer or via their notes. Even if there were coding assessments that added a quantitative element to the interview, these were often done on whiteboards or pieces of paper that then needed to be digitally transferred. The result was that interviewers often spent an extra 30 minutes simply capturing what had already transpired.

Today, the entire process is digital, which means that so much more data is automatically captured, and it’s now being put to use. We have transcription tools and video recordings that make reviewing the interview that much easier.

According to our annual State of Developer Recruiting 2020 report, 56.9% of recruiters said a major benefit of remote interviewing came from pair programming with a collaborative code editor, as this automatically captures and assesses a candidate’s coding skill in a collaborative, work-like environment. We even have automatic feedback generators that request performance input after specific questions. These are then compiled into an after-action report that simply needs to be edited rather than written from scratch.

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Check out our annual 'State of Developer Recruiting' report here!

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This means that interviewers spend less time writing and more time carefully weighing a candidate’s skill. Starting digitally puts all the data at our fingertips and allows us to make the most informed decision. Instead of a data dark spot, remote interviews are now richer than a resume.

2. Geographic flexibility

There’s no question that tech has a talent shortage. Only 60% of all tech positions are filled. When we were dependent on in-person interviews, we constrained our talent pipeline even further. With tech roles only becoming more important over time, we can’t think locally about tech hiring anymore.

The pandemic opened up new talent reserves in geographically diverse locations. We can now hire anyone from anywhere. Analysis from the State of Developer Recruiting 2020 revealed that 50.6% of recruiters said that remote interviews are beneficial due to their logistical flexibility. A further 40.4% said they saved significant time. Remote interviews with built-in features like pair programming and real-time code editing—which now constitute 11.1% of all remote coding interviews conducted—have basically solved the problem of onboarding the most qualified candidates regardless of location.

There is now a bigger pool of tech talent that can work from anywhere, and assessing them remotely has never been easier. In fact, 30.7% of recruiters said that remote hiring had actually increased their talent funnel. As the global workforce becomes even more accustomed to remote work, this means that remote interviews will be a feature of the hiring process for years to come.

3. Reduced bias

More than half (57.6%) of enterprises have placed extra emphasis on hiring for diversity in 2020. As much as I love meeting candidates face-to-face, first impressions are often clouded by personal biases that can unintentionally limit diversity. Recruiters and hiring managers tend to prefer candidates that mirror their own backgrounds in what has been termed by researchers “Looking Glass Merit.” While interpersonal and other soft skills are absolutely important, face-to-face interviews sometimes overvalue them relative to hard skills.Thankfully, remote interviews add a layer of separation that gives interviewers input on things like body language without placing undue influence on them. While 10.2% of recruiters at SMEs say that challenging unconscious bias is still a major pain point, and 13% of recruiters are specifically choosing assessment tools that help eliminate bias in the interviewing process.One way to combat this problem is to mask personally identifiable information (PII) during remote interviews so a candidate’s skills can speak for themselves. This means that name, gender, academic background, etc. are hidden during the interview itself, so the interviewer’s impression of a candidate is solely based on their skills.

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Looking for an objective, bias-free interview tool? Take HackerEarth's FaceCode for a spin right now!

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A remote interviewing future

Even after a vaccine is widely available and things start to return to “normal,” we won’t be looking back at how we used to hire. I may still meet candidates for in-person interviews from time to time but will certainly continue to use digital interviewing tools for a better interviewing experience.Today, hiring—especially in tech—is more competitive and geographically untethered than ever, so we need to make the interviewing process as convenient and flexible for candidates as possible. In the end, remote interviewing saves the company and the candidate time, and more importantly, allows interviewers to limit bias significantly relative to in-person interviews. These more objective interviews are helping managers create the best teams where skills matter. P.S. - An edited version of this article was published in FastCo.