Ask HN: Do you know startups that are changing the world of tech recruitment?

What did you use for candidate screening then? What was your biggest problem? Sifting through irrelevant applications?

Well I did believe that when I started the project. I don't know if quitting was altruism. Selling is hard enough for a programmer like me, but for this project I really recoiled from it. My heart just wasn't in it. Perhaps if communications were opt-in for the developers and we controlled the communications channel it would be okay. This piece might be worth keeping: The site scored each developer on various skills, so users could see that a person was better than 87% of their peers worldwide and better than 93% of people within 100 miles, etc. You could still use the whole population to compile those stats, even if only some people had opted in to communications. (Of course the score was based only on public data, so it was not perfect, but still it seemed like a pretty strong signal when I looked at it for people I know.)

Alright, here it goes..

>What was the most interesting, involved, or realistic question you dealt with on HackerRank? It was a rather most common one(i didn't know it was common at that time) - the infamous fruit basket question and a question to create a word builder from two notepad input to a JSON output to third file and parse the fourth and fifth notepad with the JSON output, something like that... I was/am a beginner programmer, so it was a challenging one but others will find it easy as 1 2 3.

>If you were a hiring manager, how big a difference would HackerRank make for you?

Would be huge.

On my last interview with the company I am joining soon, after all the technical rounds I sat for an one-to-one HR discussion. At that time, it was clear they are going to make me an offer with an CTC for an average professional programmer of my experience (If you'd read my other comments / submissions, All my experience are from SysAdmin job, so I am a fresher for the developer position).

I asked the HR person, "How I am the one sitting here albeit a fresher, rather an experienced dev" his answer, out of 206 applicants only "6" applicants cleared the coding interview and I am one of them. Rest 5 are ruled out on various basis, but the clear point here is, the initial level programming interview (though its more common questions) have subtracted out 98% of the applications which saved huge amount of time for the company. For a company (esp. startups) time is more precious and these kind of initial evaluations surely helps to sweep out the majority of imposters.

>* Would you put more weight on the online Q&A, or more weight on in-person interviews*

In-Person interview any day. Online evaluation can be treated as an filter but can't be a deciding factor.

One problem with online Q&A is its lowest probability to have a fool-proof prevention mechanism. As I previously said, most of the questions are provided by the HackerRank itself, those which can be easily accessed by anyone signing up for a Employer evaluation account and prepare themselves for the interview.

For company created questions, it won't prevent applicants from looking up the answers in Google since most of them are obvious ones. There were some multiple choice questions which if isn't properly crafted will be easy to find answers too.

And most importantly, you can't KNOW a PERSON from these online Q&A. After all we are hiring a Person, not just his knowledge.

>If you keep answering me, I'll keep coming up with more questions, because I am not kidding I seriously nerd out on this stuff Me too nerd out with these since I have an awesome idea (atleast awesome to me) that fills all these problems with respective to hiring landscape. And you are welcome to come up with questions and I ll try my level best to answer them.

Just to keep ranting, this is a typical process that has been happening to me:

  - Get unsolicited email by recruiter. I ignore if it's generic but if it looks like they've read something about me I answer (now I demand company name & salary range upfront to save everybody's time)

  - Recruiter follows up asking for resume or call. I have linkedin complete public profile, blog, twitter, Stackoverflow, Github etc, with all linked to each other, almost never they notice.
  - If somehow I'm still interested and I can't get out of the call ("my favorite call hours is email"), I schedule for a short call. I always write short, clear polite emails.
  - Already here the communication stops sometimes. If there's a call they invariably want to qualify me with the salary question. I've used both the "won't say at this stage" and "inflated salary" strategies.
  - Next if there's a first company phone interview (basic screening/basic tech) I always pass it, tech questions seem too basic, we schedule remote tech interview
  - In the remote tech interview I tend to fulfill the objectives but maybe I'm too slow or I'm not good at communicating or something. They say they'll call me for the next interview.
  - Then they stop communicating.

This cycle has happened to me several times recently, with several of the HN's "Who's hiring" companies. Only company which replied with a result was Facebook (wasn't a perfect match in any case) and a company in Idaho, it seems people in SV can't be bothered.

I enjoy Hackerrank very much. Although I've been away for awhile from their site. The coding platform was language-choice-flexible and I did a number of challenges in Clojure as a learning experience - very similar to the challenges from your old company, although I only played with round 1 of the security challenge.

I am not a fan of the mathematical challenges on Hackerrank, mainly because I haven't done much interesting math in years and if I get all ambitious on math stuff, I'm going to dive into functional analysis and stats modeling and probably not from a coding viewpoint. Algorithmic challenges are much more engaging to me.

Hackerrank has a very interesting option for hiring companies to sponsor a challenge or set of challenges. Based on what I read here, if I was a hiring company I would be doubling down on this approach (eg coding challenges as a feed for potential hires like you guys were doing as well). Heck, companies would probably pay five to six figures just for a curated list of candidates from these sites, right?

One specific gripe - sometimes I had the vague feeling that the programmatic challenges encourage non-idiomatic language usage. I did a very fun challenge that involved range-minimum-queries there and to ultimately to have runtime under the JVM cutoff and pass all the testcases, I kind of optimized away from the way Clojure normally looks like. I think my point is code that works well for a programming challenge may not look much like code you would want in production.

I can probably spout off more opinions but this is probably already more than you were looking for for someone who didn't use the site for actually finding a job.