HackerRank Updates

We’re very excited to announce the beta release of Company Insights, one of HackerRank for Work’s most anticipated new features. With Insights, we’ll show you all the key data on your HackerRank for Work usage so that you can make your recruitment process truly data-driven. Here are just a few of the ways that Insights will quench your thirst for recruiting data:

• Account summary: An aggregate measure of how much you’ve used HackerRank for your technical hiring, as well as the ability to drill down further by segmenting your data over time or by different teams within your organization.

• ROI Calculators: Built-in ROI calculators will give you the power to to see exactly how much you’ve saved on tech hiring since your investment in HackerRank.

• Industry benchmarks: Get an inside view of how your recruitment team is performing against other companies based on their size, industry, and location.

• Recruiter Performance: Detailed stats for every recruiter on your team gives you direct insight into who is sourcing from the best channels and how their hiring funnels compare against each other. You also get to measure the effectiveness of the screening questions and the interviewers.

We’re rolling this out today as a limited beta so if you’re interested in enabling Insights for your account, please reach out to us at support@hackerrank.com. Feel free to share your comments/feedback in the section below.

When one of your candidates completes a test, some key details are sent over to you as an email. The email is sent to the recruiter who invited the candidate and any one else you have explicitly configured in the Test’s Advanced Settings.

The email used to be sent from reports@interviewstreet.com. As part of an ongoing email infrastructure revamp we are retiring that address. The report emails will come from reports@hackerrankforwork.com starting immediately.

If you have any email filters in place please make sure to update them.

We’re very excited to announce the launch of DbRank, our latest automated platform for assessing SQL skills. It simplifies your hiring for a variety of database-related roles like Data Analysts, Business Analysts, Data Scientists, Application Developers and many more. The platform supports four of the most commonly used databases: Oracle, MS SQL server, DB2 and MySQL.

How DbRank works?

DbRank is a new question type in HackerRank for Work, such that when you create a new question you’ll select “DbRank” as your question type.

Step 1:

Write the problem description (just like you would for any other new question)

Step 2

Select a set of databases that the candidates will be allowed to leverage to write their queries. Next, create a set of tables which will be available to the candidates in their test database. This involves writing the SQL queries for table definitions and inserting data in these tables as needed. There’s also an option to generate the SQL automatically by uploading a CSV file.

Step 3

Define the expected output which will be used to automatically grade the question by matching it against the output from candidates’ queries.

How will candidates solve DbRank questions?

Candidates will solve DbRank questions in the same way that they solve any other Coding question. They’ll choose the database they want to use from the available options and then write their SQL queries in our online editor (which also supports syntax highlighting). The queries are written on the tables which were created as a part of the question. They’ll run their queries to see if their output matches the expected output.

DbRank now makes it very easy for you to assess database skills in an automated way without waiting for an in-person interview. We would love for you to try this new offering by HackerRank and share your comments and feedback with us.

Today, we’re beginning to roll out Insights for Tests/Questions on HackerRank for Work to help you understand how your tests and questions are performing.

Thousands of companies who’re looking for technical talent use HackerRank Tests to screen candidates effectively and make their recruitment process more streamlined and cost effective. Now for the first time you can gain insight into how your Tests and Questions are performing and how you can improve them over time.

Test Insights

Go to any HackerRank test and you’ll find a link to Test Insights in the left pane. Note that there’s also a link to Question Insights for each question added to the test.

The first thing you’ll notice is aggregate test statistics on the top right of the page. These include % invited candidates who end up attempting the test, median attempt time, median attempt time to full score and median score. Next, you’ll see a distribution of candidate scores. This gives a very good picture about the difficulty of the test.

Next, you go one step deeper and look at question-level statistics. This helps you understand

• How candidates are dividing their time across questions and whether the time limit for the test is sufficient or not
• Whether the score of the some questions is out of proportion to the time candidates take to solve them and you should adjust question scores

Last, you get to see the conversion funnel of candidates i.e. % of candidates who qualify the screening round.

Question Analytics

To check out the Insights for questions, you can open the question list of a test (as mentioned earlier) or go to Library.

The aggregate statistics, similar to the Test Insights, give a good idea about the difficulty of the question and the score distribution further gives a breakdown by candidates scores.

For coding questions, you see a very interesting breakdown by programming language. This helps you understand

• What languages are most commonly used by candidates to answer the question?
• Is the question relatively easier to solve in some languages than others? Some languages might give candidates an unfair advantage to solve a question much easily, which you might not want to allow going forward

Next, you see the usage of question over time. This tells you how long the question has been out there and whether it’s time to stop using it as it might already be popularly known to candidates.

We believe this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to empowering you to make your recruitment process more data-driven. Providing more insights around your HackerRank account usage, quantified returns of using HackerRank, industry-wide stats (including comparison to peers) and many more related things are among our top priorities today. We would love to hear your feedback on the Test/Question Insights and more about what insights will help your organisation.

One of the building blocks of HackerRank for Work is the Question Library: a collection of all the questions accessible to a user. These questions are used in Tests and CodePair (our tool for technical phone interviews). We’ve just released a number of improvements to the Question Library interface to help make it easier for users to browse available questions, add them to Tests, and keep their personal Library more organized.

The first thing you will now notice is that the Library page is much faster to load. We’ve made some key optimizations and brought the page load time down by 75%. One of the reasons for this remarkable speedup is our use of pagination: you will now be able to view 10 questions at a time.

There are two other important feature enhancements in this release:

1. Add to Test: Now, you have an easy option to add questions from Library directly to any of your Tests. Previously, this was only possible from a Test’s question listing page.

   

2. Archive Questions: Over time, a user’s personal Library can become cluttered. Some questions may not even be relevant anymore, or some may have just been used enough already. Users now have the ability to archive those questions. Archived questions will not be available to be added to future Tests or CodePair interviews. They are, however, still available through a separate link in the left-hand navigation bar, and can be restored to the active library at any time if needed.

If you are a recruiter using HackerRank for Work who wanted to pull together a comprehensive view of all Test and CodePair activity of a particular candidate, you would have realised that is not possible. Well, till today! We are happy to announce the launch of a simple but exciting feature that unifies all of your interaction with candidates. We do this by creating a unique page per candidate that consolidates all the activity related to that candidate, such as invite sent, test attempted, CodePair interview scheduled, etc.

Here is a sample unified timeline:

Here you can see Shikhar’s personal profile – as captured in your Test forms, a profile photo picked up from Gravatar (if available), and all Test / CodePair activity neatly shown along a timeline.

Entry Points

Anywhere you find a candidate email address as a link, clicking on the link will take you to that Candidate’s page. Currently there are four types of pages where you can find these links:

1. The candidate search results (what you get from using the search box in the common header found on all pages of the app)
2. Reports tables – invited, completed, and all other report tables where we display the email address of a candidate
3. Within a Test Report
4. Within a CodePair Report

Privacy and Information Seggregation

One word of reassurance before we wrap this up.

Your company’s interactions with a candidate is your data and will not be shared with anyone else, just like you do not get to see any other company’s interactions with said candidate. The candidate timeline you see is just the candidate’s interaction with your company.  In fact the candidate page URL contains a unique identifier that a candidates gets assigned for your company. Even if this same candidate has taken a test or CodePair interviews with another company they would be assigned another identifier. This logically separates candidate records across companies and protects your data.

Any feedback or enhancement requests? Drop us a line below!