HackerRank, a job-recruitment and social platforming company, has landed $9 million in a Series B round, bringing the company's total funding to $12.4M million. The company plans on spending the money to improve upon its recruitment platform technology and load up on sales and marketing staff.
HackerRank provides a type of developer-recruiting tool built on Ruby on Rails for employers seeking talent as well as coders looking to land a job. The tool works by providing coding challenges and games, custom tailored for each enterprise client, that would-be employees can tackle. If a company's recruiting staff likes what they see in how the coder solves the problem, the company can initiate the next steps in its recruiting process, thus bypassing the traditional hiring process in which an organization could potentially land a dud with a lack of developer experience, said Vivek Ravisankar, HackerRank's co-founder.
"The biggest problem right now is finding a way to objectively measure how skilled you are and what benefits the company, as opposed to where you worked and which school you attended," said Ravisankar.
Photo HackerRank Team
The company operates on the premise that programmers love solving challenges, and by seeing how a potential recruit solves developer-related problems, an organization can get a better understanding of a coder's problem-solving skills and their approach to work.
For example, a financial company can consult with the HackerRank team and develop a set of challenges that might include finding fraud within a set of credit card transactions. The challenge might lead to ten possible recruits who developed the most optimal code to discover the financial swindling; now the organization knows the skills of each developer and can then bring them onsite for an interview with confidence.
In the future, the company plans on expanding its gaming infrastructure to support all domains of computer science, including machine learning and artificial intelligence.
HackerRank, now based in Palo Alto, was the first Indian company to be welcomed to the Y Combinator—a startup-centric seed accelerator. The company has 50 employees.
HackerRank claims Amazon, VMware, Evernote and Skype as clients, among others.
Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures led the funding round. Also joining the investment were angel investors Peeyush Ranjan, VP of engineering at Motorola Mobility at Google, Greg Badros, former senior director of engineering at Google and Dan Rubinstein, director of product management at Facebook.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock user BlueSkyImage
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