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Product Updates

HackerRank is Going All In On Remote Interviewing

Written By Aditi Chandrasekar | September 21, 2021

The latest release in HackerRank's remote Interview solution, Pair Programming in Projects is bringing candidates and interviewers on the same page regardless of the miles (and spotty bandwidth) between them.

To meet the demand of the rising numbers of the remote workforce, HackerRank is investing heavily in its remote Interview solution. Following the release of Virtual Whiteboards and Interview Templates in the first half of 2021, HackerRank revolutionized the virtual interview process by launching Projects, real-life scenarios for Front-end, Back-end, and Full-stack developers, to get a taste of what it would be like to work with a candidate to bring an innovative idea to life.

HackerRank Projects is now enhanced with a collaborative editor

Within HackerRank Projects, an interviewer can now assess real-world skills in a pair programming way, making it easier to communicate in a virtual environment. Just by clicking the candidate's name, you can see the file they’re looking at. When they highlight a line of code, it will show up instantaneously on the interviewer's screen, making it easier to guide the candidate when they’re stuck and to get a feel for what it would be like to troubleshoot together.

Within the first 90 days of its Beta release, over 550 pair programming interviews have been conducted. Beta customers are reporting that it is providing a best-in-class candidate experience and mitigating pesky bandwidth issues you find while screen sharing.

One candidate summed up what it’s like to interview with these new sophisticated tools; “It definitely helped to be able to share the terminal. I liked being able to run code with full control over the file system and commands.”

“We wanted to build something that mirrored the experience developers are used to having in their day-to-day jobs,” explained Afzal Ashraf, the HackerRank Product Manager for HackerRank Projects.

Pair Programming is a concept that has been around for decades in the engineering field but has just entered technical recruiting. Now developers can communicate on the job and in the interview using the same experiences they love.

“Because our Interview product mirrors an actual development environment so closely, we’ve found engineers from the same company hopping into the product to work collaboratively through a problem together.” Explains Raghav Gopalakrishnan, a HackerRank Product Manager.

This is one of many feature enhancements scheduled for interviewing in HackerRank in 2021. As the company goes all-in on improving the user experience, including a complete revamp of the user interface, interviewing with HackerRank is set to remain the industry standard for remote technical hiring.