HackerRank is a social platform for fun coding challenges that launched at TechCrunch SF Disrupt in 2012. It grew out of Interviewstreet, a technical recruiting platform that’s being used by companies like Evernote and Amazon to screen potential hires. Today, the company is combining these two brands under the HackerRank label. HackerRank will continue to operate as usual and Interviewstreet will become HackerRankX, a white label version of the HackerRank platform.
At the same time, the company today launched CodePair, a new tool for doing technical interviews online as part of HackerRankX. With CodePair, developers and interviewers can collaboratively code online in real-time. Interviewers can set the environment up for their coding questions ahead of time and create a catalog of their favorites. These questions can then be shared and reused across the company, which HackerRank says will allow candidates to be measured across the same rubric.
The tool’s built-in code checker lets interviewers quickly evaluate code and provides a step-by-step view of the process. CodePair understands 16 of the most commonly used programming languages, and users can compile code right there in the application.
Vivek Ravisankar, the company’s co-founder, told me that he believes that technical phone interviews remain broken. Interviewers often still use Google Docs or similar platforms for real-time coding. He believes CodePair will allow for more accurate assessments of somebody’s coding skills than the standard whiteboard or phone interview.
All the other existing tools from Interviewstreet have also been ported over to HackerRankX, and Ravisankar tells me that the company has been signing up many new customers for its platform in recent months. While the majority of users still come from traditional tech firms and startups, many of the new customers also come from banks and other businesses that aren’t solely focused on tech.
Paid accounts for HackerRankX start at $199 for single-user accounts and up to 50 interviews per month. This basic account does not feature access to CodePair and most of HackerRank’s more advanced tools. For access to these, companies have to pay $299 per month. Enterprises will be able to get custom pricing, as well as access to audio and video as part of the CodePair experience once this feature launches later this year.
Now that this tool has launched, the company is thinking about how to extend its reach beyond the recruiting process. In the long run, HackerRank wants to give companies more insight into which interview questions worked best to predict a new employee’s success, for example.
As for HackerRank itself, Ravisankar tells me it has close to half a million programmers in its database and its coding contests have become quite popular (mostly thanks to word-of-mouth marketing). The company expects to continue to expand this platform, too, and thanks to HackerRankX/Interviewstreet already bringing in considerable revenue, the company has the luxury of doing just that.