AI Recruiting

The intern hiring season (beginning in February) usually serves as a breath of fresh air, and offers an undisturbed, fresh talent pool for companies. Throwing a full-fledged spanner in the works, however, last year’s pandemic led to nation-wide lockdowns, and shuttered campuses and offices. Hiring for interns on Glassdoor for April 2020 fell as much as 39% when compared to April 2019.With the inevitable shift to remote work, virtual or remote internships started coming into the spotlight. With a wider talent pool to pick from, recruiters have had their work cut out for them to make good hires.

In post-pandemic 2021, the one word defining any practice is reinvention. The same is also true of tech recruiters who, whether hiring for interns or full-time employees, need to transform their practices, right from the grassroots level.

They have to ask themselves, are remote internships a new fad or are they here to stay?

What do we think?

At HackerEarth, reinvention is second nature to us. We aim to stay ahead of the curve and constantly change the way we address our talent needs, right from sourcing to onboarding. We decided to assess where we currently stand on remote hiring for interns and how best to take it forward this year.

My conversations with Sachin Gupta, our CEO, Vishwastam Shukla, CTO, and Murali Krishna, HackerEarth’s Senior HR Generalist, brought to fore some insightful strategies that everyone can benefit from when hiring and onboarding interns this year. Read on!

#1 How has HackerEarth transformed the entire process of hiring and onboarding post-COVID?

In Sachin’s words, “Interviewing and in a lot of cases, even screening, was done manually before COVID-19. The pandemic has forced everyone to move to a virtual recruiting process. This has had a huge impact on campus recruiting and face-to-face interviews.

HackerEarth has been instrumental in helping companies adapt their recruiting processes to a completely virtual set up. The take-home assessments can be used for screening candidates in both campuses as well as lateral hiring and FaceCode makes it super simple to have pair programming interviews.”

#2 When you think about remote onboarding, how much of it is purely digital? Is there still a need for the “human element” to be present? If yes, how can recruiters ensure that personal touch is brought to the table, virtually?

“Personally, there is always a need for “human element” in onboarding. While a lot of functional aspects of onboarding interns can be covered digitally through pre-recorded videos and self-serve portals, they can only do so much. A human touch to it can make the employees feel a lot more welcome and integrated.

A simple way is to ensure there are regular check-ins about work and casual interactions about everything else by the key stakeholders for every new employee. We, at HackerEarth, assign a buddy to each intern at the beginning of the onboarding process. A buddy helps ease them into their role and navigate uncharted waters. For the initial two weeks, every manager that interns would be working with takes some time and personally introduces themselves and their team,” says our CEO.

#3 How do you think HackerEarth has been able to provide an engaging, meaningful internship experience, all the while from a remote perspective?

Our CTO, Vishy being the expert in this area, answered this for us.

“Interns at HackerEarth were always entrusted with significant responsibilities. Continuing with this practice and asking interns to help with high impact projects has helped us engage with them at a deeper level right from the beginning.

The pandemic required us to do things a little differently to make sure that the interns felt like they belonged here. We assigned each intern with a buddy engineer who has always been available to guide them. Virtual mentorship has meant that managers and mentors double down their efforts towards mentees by defining crisp goals for them.”

#4 At the onset of the pandemic, and throughout the last year, companies’ hiring processes have undergone significant changes . What changes would you want to keep, and what part of the pre-COVID hiring process would you want to go back to?

“At HackerEarth, two big changes that we saw were a wider adoption of automated screening and an increased number of virtual video interviews . We believe both are likely to stay even if we go back to pre-COVID work environments. The ability to effectively screen candidates without a lot of manual intervention allows companies to widen their recruiting funnel without spending too much. This leads to a more diverse candidate pipeline and eventually a better talent pool.

Even in the case of interviews, it’s highly ineffective for people to conduct in-person interviews where the candidates have to write code on a white board or use pen/paper. Our intelligent tool, FaceCode allows interviewers conduct streamlined interviews and reduces discrimination or bias while making decisions,” shares Sachin.

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#5 Companies are changing the way they usually hire and are looking at newer traits in 2021. What, in your opinion, does talent acquisition look like in the post-COVID phase?

Our CEO believes that the outlook towards recruiting has been significantly altered by the pandemic.

He says, “We are likely to see a lot more hybrid workspaces where people are working from office, working from homes and working remotely. Today, both candidates and companies will have a wider set of options at their disposal, which means that recruiters will have to dip into sourcing channels that were earlier not relevant to them.

It also means that they will be competing for the candidate’s mindshare against organizations that were previously not their competitors. Recruiters have to step up their game and provide the right candidate experience to attract the best talent from this diversified pool.

COVID has accelerated adoption of tools across segments and talent acquisition is no different. Recruiters should be proactively thinking about how they can be more efficient by using the right tools in their recruiting process. We will see increased adoption of tools that help automate various aspects of recruitment, without taking away the human touch from it.”

#6 What are some practices that you have used personally that you would suggest recruiters follow to ensure that new joinees feel like a part of the team, right from the start?

One of the most difficult things, according to Murali, that the team had to face when onboarding new joinees was making them understand our work culture.

“We overcame this by trying to create as much interaction as possible. We wanted to ensure that they were a part of conversations that had nothing to do with work. Holding fun-filled virtual activities also helped in making them get to know each other and engage comfortably with the existing team members.

We made sure that the new joinees had access to all the required tools and resources right from the get-go. Providing google drive access, which consisted of policies and documents related to HE, assigning a buddy to each new joinee and holding orientation sessions with every team, helps in making every new member feel like a part of the team.

Another thing that is specific to HackerEarth is our MyStory sessions. We aim to make every employee feel like they can be their complete self with no apologies or judgement. These sessions are a platform for our employees to share their personal experiences and stories and show them that we care. Not only about their work but also about their personal lives. We try to bring their personality out into the world and make them feel comfortable,” says Murali.

#7 A recent Forbes article listing predictions for hiring and recruitment in 2021 foreshadows an increased adoption of practices aimed at eliminating bias in the screening and hiring process. This being one of HackerEarth’s critical values, what do you think needs to be done to eliminate bias, wherever possible?

We posed this question to Sachin, and here’s what he had to say.

1. “There needs to be a measurement framework in place that regularly tracks the diversity quotient of the recruiting process, metrics like ratio of diverse candidates, fallout from screening to interviews, and interviews to hire. This should allow companies to see how their diversity efforts are trending, and enable them to identify areas that are having a high negative impact on diversity.
2. A lot of bias is unconscious so it’s important for people to understand where they can go wrong. Rigorous bias training for hiring managers and recruiters helps in identifying and controlling their biases.
3. Remote interviewing tools are a great way of reducing bias in the recruiting process. They have options to mask unimportant PII from hiring managers, as well as the option of conducting a blind interview.
4. Skill-based hiring processes ensure that hiring managers focus on skills and not on other traits that may not have any relevance to the job.
5. Structured interviewing process enables recruiters to use pre-defined, standardized questions and evaluation parameters. This ensures that all candidates are assessed fairly and objectively. Post interview feedback should be recorded in real-time to avoid recency bias.”

Companies are plodding on and finding ways to make remote internships work, because internships serve as a test drive for employers to seal the deal with the new joinees. They are the most effective way that a recruiter or hiring manager can see the value that the interns bring to the table. According to research by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), nearly 68% of interns are offered full-time jobs.

Interns, there is light at the end of the pandemic tunnel! Stay equipped to intern virtually and better your chances of getting that job.

You can always write to us at contact@hackerearth.com to know more about how HackerEarth can help you with remote hiring.

How does one define a word that has been around for ages, and yet has no distinct meaning? Having just come out of an interview, where someone said “I want to be a part of HackerEarth because of your culture”, I found myself thinking, how oft-used (to the point of becoming banal) yet indecipherable the word culture really is. Contradictory, don’t you think?

Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. I totally believe that it eats strategy for lunch and dinner too (someone said that as well I think).

The reason why culture is so hard to pin down, in my opinion, is because it’s not a specific set of processes that everyone agrees upon. Wall Street swears by its black-tie culture. Startups think it’s cool that you can use four-letter words in a conversation with your CEO and not get flak for it. Perhaps it’s not as much as what we do as what we don’t, which is the real measure of an organization’s culture.

When writing your culture handbook, the must-nots are probably more important than the must-haves. As HR professionals, it is our job to help define what the must-nots really are.

At HackerEarth, our work culture revolves around a central DON’T.

Don’t Be An Asshole.

When I first walked into HackerEarth, I was awestruck by a poster screaming “Don’t Be An Asshole”. Which, if you look closely, should be the basic tenet of every company’s culture handbook. The poster was a big part of the reason I signed up for the job.

The tenet is self-explanatory, but if asked to explain I would say it translates to don’t be that manager, that colleague, that employee, and that person who makes life hell for others at work. Period. Everything at HackerEarth stems from this basic idea of respect – for self, and for others.

Keeping respect as the central sun of HackerEarth’s galaxy helps us do a few things well:

• It helps us keep our employees at the forefront of our organization.
• It helps us underline what is NOT OKAY – behaviors, patterns, conflicts get called out much more easily and resolved faster.
• It helps us trust our teammates and give them the freedom they need.
• It helps us understand differences and find common ground.
• It helps us put the team above individual egos.

Let me elaborate.

1. Keeping employees at the forefront of the organization.

Our approach is ‘inside-out’ when it comes to our people. For anything and everything we do, we start the conversation by asking what it means for our people and then move outward to answer what it means for the company. Yes, it does mean there’s a lot of care and mutual trust for our people. No, it does not mean that we don’t make difficult decisions. We make those decisions too; only we do so with care.

For my peers in HR, you need to move away from the crutches of policies, processes, and practice, and start placing that lens more on individuals. Your policies are just a guidebook. They aren’t written in stone. If you must break the rules to do the right thing, then just do it.

2. Underlining what is NOT OKAY.

We like to keep it straightforward and simple. If someone is disrespectful in their tone, or their action, we boldly call it out and tell them it’s NOT OK. In some of these conversations people stay; in others we politely, but firmly, take corrective action.

As an HR professional, you need to be proactive in constantly calling out what’s NOT OK. And that’s how the company learns to do it, too. You also need to ensure that what’s NOT OK does not change for a company’s CEO, the top leaders, your boss, your employees, or yourself.

3. Trusting our people and giving them complete freedom.

Before HackerEarth, I had never worked in a company that trusts so unconditionally. It’s commendable how we do it. We do not hide any information. We always give our people an understanding of the why behind a decision. Even if it is the decision about a pandemic-induced pay-cut or about letting someone go. If we have made a mistake, we own it. We provide every opportunity for our people to ask difficult questions. In fact, we get worried when they don’t. We are never afraid to be vulnerable in front or to show emotions, and that takes a lot of trust.

We want our people to feel as confident to say ‘NO’, as they would feel saying a ‘YES’. We’re not afraid to make mistakes. We’re famously anal about learning from those mistakes. This is part of trusting them.

Dear HR peeps, please don’t kill the human side of the job. Rather, deal with the ‘people’ side of things to make your job, and the company, better. You have plenty of time to go back to those 2 Ps (Policies, Processes) later. This also means that you need to openly show your human side, too. It’s unfortunate that the strong conditioning of the HR industry has always asked us to portray a ‘rock-solid HR’ figure. Spend time thinking about how comfortable you feel about owning your emotions, and creating a safe space for others to do so, too.

4. Understanding differences. Finding common grounds.

We let our people bring their whole selves to work. We don’t expect anyone to be under any pressure to outperform the other person. We understand that each one of us is different. Yes, we expect them to be the best version of themselves, and give their best, while respecting their innate differences.

As a startup, velocity is extremely important for us. So is listening to everyone at the table and finding what works best for an individual, the team, and the company at large. In that order. You cannot dream of the best ideas without critique. Everyone loves doers. We love and respect naysayers as well, and trust them to be our conscience keepers.

A word of caution here. Differences and diversity are beautiful, only when practiced with intent. Dear HR people, please don’t overuse the word diversity and inclusion at the drop of your hat. ‘Inclusion’ is really not for everyone. You need to be bold to allow for it. Be honest if you want similar people. That’s OK too. Be honest if you want people to say ‘yes’ all the time. But if you really want your people to say ‘NO’, then bloody well coach yourself and your leaders to listen to the ‘NO’, embrace the diverse thoughts, encourage it. I’m not championing ‘Inclusion’ for the sake of it. I’m fiercely advocating it for the merit of it – for any business and its people.

5. Putting the team above individual egos.

At HackerEarth, we pride ourselves on being the stone that cuts brilliant individuals, but it cannot stop there. They need to contribute to creating brilliant teams. We do not tolerate cut-throat behavior between individuals, ever.

Putting the team above individual egos also means allowing for and respecting divergence. Our people challenge us, all the time. And we absolutely adore the fact! We strongly believe in Team > Me and do not compromise on it, at any cost.

Dear HR people, creating a brilliant or high-performing team does not mean individuals need to be in constant competition. It means supporting them in becoming the best version of themselves. Don’t create stress in the guise of gunning for performance.

Coach your leaders to intuitively understand strengths and weaknesses. Not everyone performs at the same level.

Some parting advice from Anti-AssholeVille.

I have always believed that the role of an HR professional is to be the sole custodian of a company’s culture. In the span of my career, I have seen the conversation around work culture morph from ‘what time does an employee punch in’ to ‘what can we do to make our employees happier?’. Topics of diversity, equality, and the creation of a fair and hospitable workplace are our water-cooler gossip now.

To me, it all stems from respecting the Other. In literature and philosophy, the ‘Other’ is anyone who is not you or doesn’t follow the norms laid down by you. ‘Otherization’ is an actual verb, and something I see happening in many HR teams. We are trained to believe a good employee is one who is always hungry, acing their projects; a rabbit on a constant dopamine hunt.

For instance, when someone says “what do I need to do if I need to stay in the same job role and level for the next 3 years?”, our first instinct is to brand them as ‘unambitious’. That’s Otherization. And that’s being an Asshole.

In situations like this, I remind myself to approach with respect. The person in front of me may not have the same life goals as I do, or as I was taught that all employees should have, but it is a goal they believe in personally and I do not have the right to judge. Instead of stereotyping, I remind myself that their statement only means that this is what they want NOW. My role: to facilitate this NOW, so that I can retain a hard-working teammate for the future.

It’s NOT OK to judge, or draw people into boxes, or pitch them against each other. Or otherize them in any manner. This is where we as HR professionals need to be aware of our unconscious biases, and the assholes we can be if we let age-old dictums govern the way we create our workplaces.

So, take charge. Be open to learn and unlearn. Lead with respect so that you can create a more fair, equitable, honest, and pleasant workplace.

And never, ever, be an Asshole.

Tech hiring has undergone a radical transformation with take-home assessments gaining popularity over traditional methods in recent times. Since even a single instance of candidate malpractice can taint the efficacy of the entire test process, it stands to reason that take-home assessments and remote interviews would never have gained their current credibility without a foolproof online proctoring mechanism.

Proctoring is crucial to validate a candidate’s authenticity and integrity. Without some sort of online supervision, it would be impossible to claim that assessment platforms such as HackerEarth offer accurate results and candidate analysis.

In short,

Standardized Developer Hiring = Customized and Intuitive Coding Tests + Robust Proctoring

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at the 6 most commonly deployed tricks your assessment tool needs to guard against, shall we?

#1. Switching tabs to get online assistance/reference during a test

El switch-a-tab-aroo.

This is a classic one, and probably the most obvious example in our list. A lot of candidates happily assume that interviewers and creators of assessment software blindly trust in a candidate’s ready inclination to always take the moral high ground. But the angelic souls who create such software are well aware of this age-old technique and have hence installed divine software intervention to guard against it. #NotAllDevelopers

Fixes: Full-screen mode, Custom timer on MCQs, Automatic log-out.

#2. Copy-pasting code from another computer or from the web

El copy-paste-o.

Another age-old trick in the digital book is the incredibly humble copy-paste. With the latest upgrades in Windows and Mac operating systems, candidates can, in fact, store and keep-at-the-ready, not one but a string of copied texts. You can access these copied pieces of code with just a couple of keystrokes. This includes productivity tools, messengers, data and word processing apps, Mac cleaners, and security software.

Fixes: Copy-paste lock, Full-screen mode.

#3. Getting other users to take the test on their computer

El Imperson-anaa-tor.

What’s the best part about take-home coding tests? Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be you that’s taking them. Your coding prodigy of a best friend, or perhaps that bespectacled kid in class who hibernates in the library, could take them for you, all for a quick buck.

Fixes: Randomized webcam snapshots, IP Address Lock, Automatic impersonation detection.

Also read: Importance Of Online Proctoring In University Hiring

#4. Moving away from the webcam to look into another laptop/screen/book.

El dos screen-o.

A lot of candidates, unfortunately, give in to the overpowering urge to sneak a peek into another screen or a book. They’re often prepared with a secondary device that’s kept hidden from the web camera’s line of sight. So, it’s extremely easy for them to access these hidden resources unbeknownst to the system. What’s more, the screens of neighboring candidates are also a potential cause for concern.

Fixes: Randomized webcam snapshots, Plagiarism checker, Automatic mobile phone detection.

#5. Having another person in the room who can read out answers and solutions for you

El dos candidate-o.

A good friend will bail you out of jail. But a best friend will be sitting in the cell with you, going “Wow, wasn’t that something?”.

God bless friends who will, more than willingly, aid and abet candidates in a malpractice attempt. Candidates take advantage of the fact that there aren’t any audio recording devices embedded in the test system. So, they can either try taking the assistance of a gifted comrade in the case of remote assessments, or others who are also taking the test if using an onsite group interview room.

Fixes: Randomized webcam snapshots, Plagiarism checker.

#6. Restroom breaks

El missing suspect-o.

The final and the most elementary (quite literally) of all is the innocent nature’s call card. In the case of remote examinations, the computer and its camera basically account for all of your exam halls, and everything that’s out of the webcam’s line of sight is not. For the briefest time, you’re Alice in ‘Wander’land, and the whole house is your deception oyster.

Fixes: Randomized webcam snapshots, Custom timer on MCQs.

Also read: 5 Must-Have Proctoring Tips For A Developer Assessment Platform

9 Ways They Aren’t. (HackerEarth Proctoring Fixes In Detail)

If you were worried about what you read above, then allow yourself to breathe a sigh of relief. HackerEarth Assessments has in-built proctoring features to ensure that every assessment taken on our platform is monitored to ensure authenticity. Here are the most important ones:

#1. Randomized webcam snapshots – 2 every minute

This is the biggest and most potent gun we have in our arsenal. The reason this ranks the highest in our list is that, unlike the other features which are announced by the system, it is easy to forget about this functionality. Randomized webcam snapshots basically pick up any sort of malpractice attempt, ranging from peering into a second screen to verbal communication with another person in the room.

#2. Custom timers on multiple choice questions

This is based on the premise that it takes time to look for or seek any form of assistance. So, a timer on the MCQ questions is a good way to keep the pressure on the candidate, discouraging them from wasting any time scouring the internet or elsewhere for a solution. The other logic behind this feature is that the short amount of time will simply not allow you to cheat, as it just won’t be humanly possible to look for hints, do your calculations, and finally punch them in.

#3. Plagiarism checker. All submissions need to be unique

Another heavy piece of artillery in our war against interview malpractices is our system’s inbuilt plagiarism checker. This advanced AI-assisted function is every recruiter’s dream come true. It investigates a candidate’s code against all the other applicant submissions for the same test.

Even the remotest match in code is picked up by the system immediately and the respective administrator is promptly notified.

Also read: 3 Things To Know About Remote Proctoring

HackerEarth add-ons for robust proctoring

Here are some additional proctoring fixes that further bulletproof our assessments, making it one of the most reliable and accurate sources of remote technical candidate evaluations out there in the market today. Learn more about them in detail in our support article, here.