Revamped Test Invitation Workflow

Inviting candidates to take a test is one of the most common activities for a recruiter on our site. Today we are launching a fully revamped test invite workflow to make this repetitive process more efficient for our users.

The new interface is shown in the screenshot below. The first thing you would notice is the entire interface has been cleaned up. We have also addressed some common concerns raised by our users. Finally we have added a few nifty new features as well!

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Inviting multiple candidates at a time

As before you can paste a comma separated list of email addresses in the input box. With the new changes you will be able to review the added candidates and edit the list if you so wish. Duplicates are automatically purged from the list.

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We also have a bulk upload facility, whereby you can select a CSV file containing name and email addresses in a specific format. When a CSV is selected, the invite form is populated with email ids in the file so you can review and process them.

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Send Copy to Myself

We’ve always had a Preview Invite option that allowed you to see the format of an invite. Some of our users wanted more. So we added yet another way to keep tabs on what we send to candidates on your behalf. By checking the ‘Send copy to myself’ box you will be added to Cc: on the actual email sent to each candidate in your invite list. Beware! If you have 100 candidates in your invite list, you will receive 100 emails!

Advanced Invite Settings

Our invite flow had some rarely used settings for some advanced users. In the new interface we have hidden those behind the ‘advanced settings’ link. Be sure to check that out, though. There are some useful features, like candidate tags, that can come in handy in some scenarios.

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Asynchronous Inviting

The biggest improvement, though, is not as visible as the above changes, but is guaranteed to be most useful to our heavy users. We have totally revamped the backend processing engine to ensure that your invite list is processed in the background. This means you can send invites to one thousand candidates at a time, and go on to attend to other things while our system processes the invite list. In the earlier flow, the browser would have hung waiting for the server to complete inviting everyone. It is likely the process would not even have completed successfully. We have fixed these problems for good.

As soon as you press Send Invites you will be taken to the ‘Invited’ page for that test, where status of invited candidates will start appearing as and when they are processed. Depending on the number of candidates you have invited, they might not all appear on the Invited page immediately. You may have to refresh the page a few times or come back to the page after attending to other pressing matters!

We are investing a lot of time into making your most common tasks intuitive and pain-free. Let us know what you think of this change, and any other changes you would like to see in the product!

Change to HackerRank’s email address

We are rolling out a change to the domain from which we send out transactional email. Once this change is fully rolled out, all emails from us will originate from support@hackerrankforwork.com. We have started this rollout and this activity should be completed by the end of month (28th Feb, 2015). To be doubly sure that our emails never go to your spam folder, please take a moment to add support@hackerrankforwork.com to your mail program’s whitelist.

Introducing SudoRank (Beta)

We are very excited to announce the launch (in closed beta) of SudoRank – our latest automated platform for assessing system administrators. You can read more about the feature on our corporate blog. If you would like participate in the beta program please leave a comment below, write to us at support@hackerrank.com, or request a demo through the SudoRank home page

Adding code stubs made easier

Time and again we have received feedback from candidates that it is a distraction to figure out how to parse program input. It is particularly irksome for candidates who choose languages like Javascript, where knowing how to read console input is virtually never a real world requirement.

We, as well as our customers, want candidates to focus on showcasing their algorithm / problem-solving skills rather than struggle with uncommon programming patterns. To that end we promote setting up Code Stubs as a best practice while creating coding questions. The Question creation tool has always allowed a way for the problem setter to do this. Today we have made a change that make the process even easier to use.   Selection_165 Before we proceed, just a word on terminology. ‘Stub’ is the function present in the Body. This is what a candidate is expected to fill out. ‘Scaffolding’ is the part of the auto-generated code that surrounds the Stub and includes code that reads test cases from STDIN and write the output to STDOUT. ‘Template’ is used for the whole thing – i.e. Stub + Scaffolding. The screenshot above is from Step 2 of a Create New Question or Edit Question workflow. The key improvements from the older workflow are highlighted for you. In brief they are:

  1. You can now view the entire code stub the same way it is shown to candidates when they take a test.
  2. There is a clear visual indicator if the problem setter has modified the system generated templates.
  3. There is an easy way to discard user edits and go back to system generated templates.

Let us know what you think!

Save Notes for Coding questions

We’re happy to announce yet another feature to simplify the coding assessment process for companies using HackerRank for Work. Going forward, as you create your own coding questions, you can add internal notes about the question, which will not be displayed to the candidates. These notes will help a great deal in cases when the team member assessing a solution is not the same as the one who created the question. Please see the below screenshots to see where this feature is available and use it in action.

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Create a Coding Question (Step 1)

 

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Detailed Candidate Report

 

We plan to roll this out to all other question types (besides coding) too.  Feel free to share your feedback in the comments below.

DroidRank is now in open beta!

We’re very excited to announce that DroidRank (which we launched as closed beta a few months back) is now available to all our customers as a limited time open beta. It’s a great way to assess Android developers and we look forward to you taking it for a spin and sharing your feedback. Please read our previous detailed post on DroidRank to learn more what it can do for your mobile programming hiring!

Bulk invite candidates by CSV upload

The most common recruiter activity on HackerRank for Work is to invite candidates for screening tests. While the current interface already allows a user to invite multiple candidates, there are couple of scenario which are not handled well. If a recruiter has a list of candidate emails in excel, they have to convert it into a comma-separated list and paste. Also, there are cases where recruiters want to invite a lot of candidates (e.g. 500 candidates for a campus recruitment drive). In such a case, they typically face time out issues when using the comma-separated approach.

Now, you have a very easy way to invite candidates in bulk by simply uploading a CSV file containing a list of the email IDs (and optionally names) of the candidates. This is available on the invite interface as shown in the screenshots below. This upload functionality now allows you to send any number of invites without a timeout.

Note: Currently, one can’t change the invite settings (invite email subject/body, invite expiry, candidate tags etc) when using the CSV upload functionality. Our next set of changes to this flow will allow this. Besides that a) The timeout issue for comma-separated approach will be fixed b) The recruiter will be able to track the delivery status of invite emails sent. Stay tuned!

Invite Interface

screenshot1

 

CSV upload pop up

screenshot2

 

Feel free to share your comments on this change below.

 

 

Organize your tests better

While we’re actively diversifying our products to help with phone interviews (CodePair) and other aspects of technical recruitment, screening tests continue to be extremely popular among HackerRank for Work users: a very simple way to shortlist good candidates by inviting them to take a test with automated assessment. This popularity means that over time a typical company would accumulate dozens of tests, making it hard to find specific tests, or to even browse through them in some logical way. We have had a ‘Starred Tests’ feature that allows certain tests to stick to the top of the tests listing, but we have had requests asking us to do more.

Today we have rolled out the first of many planned enhancements to help you manage your tests suite better. You will find a new left-pane for the Tests home page, similar to what you must already be familiar in the home pages for CodePair and Library: using the left pane you will find that you can easily access tests created by you (“My Tests”), tests shared with you by other team members (Shared With Me) and tests marked with a star (Starred Tests). This, along with the search functionality present on the top of page, will help you quickly navigate to the tests of interest.

We have more such enhancements in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

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Changes to our CDN

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are an important part of our strategy to ensure HackerRank loads fast for our users globally. Today we have made a small tweak to our CDN implementation that will improve performance for you. Read on for more details in Q&A format

What is your (HackerRank) CDN approach and what is the present change?

Every time a user comes to our site, we pick from a list of CDN hosts that have the fastest response times. With the change today we are adding one more CDN to that list, boosting performance for some of our users.

What does the change mean for me as a customer?

Majority of our users would not notice anything. If the new host is better for you, you would automatically benefit from it. The only users who may have to do something are those who have set up explicit domain white lists.

We have set up domain whitelists for HackerRank. What exactly should I do now?

You (or your corporate IT) should add the domain “static.hrcdn.net” to the white list.

I do not understand what domain whitelists are / I am not sure if we are using a domain whitelist, what should I do? Will my work be affected?

Don’t worry. You can ignore this update. Your performance will be no different from what it was before this change.

 

You can always reach out to us at support@hackerrank.com in case of any queries.

Improved Teams Management

For every B2B product that involves usage by multiple people in the organization, it’s important that the product allows the right team settings to be configured in line with the actual organization. In line with this, HackerRank for Work continues to improve the “Teams Management” functionality. Our most recent changes make the “Teams Management” page much faster. We’ve implemented pagination per team so 10 members are displayed per team by default. This can be changed to 20 or 50 members if needed. Along with this, one can now search for a member in individual teams besides a global search. This simplifies the page and makes it very quick, while keeping all the existing functionalities.

You can check these changes via Settings (click on your account name in top right) -> Teams Management.

 

Screenshot of Updated Teams Management Screen
Screenshot of Updated Teams Management Screen