Bengaluru-based start-up aids e-commerce biggies in campus recruitments

HackerRank assessed over 1,00,000 students in this placement season

While e-commerce companies emerged as major recruiters during the ongoing placement season at engineering colleges, Bengaluru-based start-up HackerRank was backing most of these online retailers.

Harishankaran K, the 27-year-old co-founder of HackerRank was taken by surprise when he realised that all the three companies participating in the recruitment drive at the campus were his clients. It’s clients include Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Target, InMobi, Adobe and LinkedIn, among others.

According to experts, it takes an average 22 minutes for a recruiter to scan through a resume and an average 60 minutes to interview a candidate. HackerRank is a platform that assesses students through hacking challenges and automatically scores and stack-ranks candidates, saving a lot of time for recruiters. The platform is not only used for assessing students during placements, but also used by companies to find the best skilled aspirants through technology challenges.

The company, which raised $9.2 million in Series B funding this year, is backed by Khosla Ventures, Peeyush Ranjan (managing director of Google India R&D), ZenShin Capital, Dan Rubinstein, Greg Badros, and Battery Ventures.
 

In 2008, when Harishankaran and his fellow co-founder Vivek Ravisankar appeared for campus placements at their college, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, they had to manually assess candidates for hours. Harishankaran recalls that he had to stay awake into the wee hours of the night for an interview, and by the time he was called in by the interviewers, he was too strained to perform well.

“Only 10 years ago, 90% of companies would go to campus with the intention of conducting a pen-and-paper coding test. However, now the trend has reversed and only 10% of companies visiting campuses follow the old method. The rest have adopted technology to optimise the process,” Harishankaran said. “With online platforms like HackerRank being used widely, companies now have the liberty to recruit coding gems from remote colleges as well, which a company may have rejected due to logistics constraints.”

Besides India, HackerRank has a significant presence in the US, with Ravisankar permanently based from there. Around 45 of the company's total 80 employees are based out of the US.