HackerRank: Enrich Your Enterprise's Lifecycle through Skilled Programming Prowess Date:   Sunday , November 23, 2014 As innovation in the technology industry continues to burgeon, the demand for programmers has also sped up its pace. This rapidly growing demand also has driven employers to search for the ideal tech talent who can help keep their company afloat in this fastpaced tech world. But, it is a daunting task for the companies and the programmers to pick the best from the rest. And in the drive to top the competition, enterprises might also fail to consider the real coding skills of the potential employees. Once out of the college, the two dynamic programmers - Harishankaran K and Vivek Ravisankar sensed this gap between employers and skilled programmers. They set out to address this gap by creating a meritocratic platform, HackerRank, which is democratizing tech recruiting. \"Imagine a platform where you could hone your coding skills (for free), get an opportunity to connect with top companies (purely based on skill) and companies identifying the right hire in 25 percent of the original time (reducing time to fill) - that\'s an utopian state,\" quotes Vivek Ravisankar, Co-Founder, HackerRank. Today this vision has become a reality as the platform boasts close to a million developers who participate in several thousands of coding challenges daily on the platform. Its enterprise offering, HackerRank for Work, is a powerful platform for technical interviewing and assessments. Engineered to ease the interview process for companies that hire engineers, the platform helps the recruiters to source candidates, assess their technical skills objectively and provide a detailed analysis of the applicant\'s coding skills. The enterprise offering has proven to be robust with respect to identifying talented programmers and customers have shown results of approximately 5070 developer hours saved for every hire made. As a part of its publicly accessible platform, HackerRank provides a community for coders where they get an access to code for fun, education, prizes and jobs. Companies can also sponsor real world challenges for coders to solve, thereby enabling them to discover top talent. Combating Challenges HackerRank believes that challenges exist in every phase of professional life. The company had initially faced a lot of challenges and has combated them successfully. \"When our model was pretty early, it was about raising money and gaining initial trust from the customers. This later shifted to hiring the right people and scaling really fast. Today, it is about maintaining a uniform culture across different locations,\" proclaims Vivek. Nourishing A Flat Work Environment Too much managerial overhead can slow down productivity and discourage creativity. Maintaining a flat work culture becomes critical in overcoming this downfall. Many organizations have now realized the need for implementing a flat work ambience, but very few have adopted and executed it efficiently, HackerRank is one of them. The culture vested in the organization is emphasized by the attitude of people they hire. While the work environment encourages the crew to be intense and ambitious, it also helps them foster better teamwork and build a healthy relationship with each other. Aspiring to Enroot a Flat Professional World The number of new tech jobs just in the U.S has been estimated to grow by approximately one million in next 4 years. With this number proliferating constantly, the demand for talented programmers is also poised for phenomenal growth. Concerning this, HackerRank believes that ability to make the entire hiring process based on meritocracy & skill is a huge win. \"We\'re on a mission to make the world flat where the only thing that matters is your skill,\" concludes Vivek. Panel: Key Management: Harishankaran K, CoFounder & CTO Prior to founding HackerRank (Erstwhile: Interviewstreet.com), Harishankaran worked as a software engineer at IBM. His current charter in HackerRank is to supervise the product delivery and manage the entire development team. Vivek Ravisankar, CoFounder & CEO Before HackerRank, Vivek worked as a Software Development Engineer in Kindle Content Services team at Amazon. Investors: Y Combinator, The Morpheus, ZenShin Capital, Khosla Ventures, Start Fund and SV Angel Achievements: First Indian company to get into Y Combinator Offices: Mountain View, California & Bangalore CEO Speaks: Start a company because you genuinely believe in the mission. That\'s the only thing that\'ll keep you going. There are a ton of things that\'ll come in your way as obstacles some of them are market realities that you\'ve to overcome and others are just annoying (like clones popping up to get a small percent of the market)? ignore all of that because if you are the one who started the movement and genuinely care about the mission, you\'ll win.