HackerRank Innovators Awards, co-hosted by ETHRWorld, is an annual celebration of remarkable innovation and strategies in talent and people functions — and exceptional adoption of HackerRank. This year, the event was conducted at The Leela Palace in Bengaluru, India, where over 370 talent leaders from various prestigious organizations participated. Our 2023 award winners have championed skills-based strategies, created exceptional experiences for candidates, and grown multifold in the talent landscape.
What are the HackerRank Innovator Awards?
HackerRank Innovator awards recognize the best-in-class talent leaders who, with their ingenuity and dedication to create exceptional talent experience, drove exceptional results for their respective organizations. Furthermore, the event serves as a testament to the belief that collaborative partnerships with talent leaders enable transformative growth and innovation.
The 2023 awards was the ultimate tech and talent fiesta; leaders from over 100 organizations like Amazon, Prudential, HSBC, Flipkart, Cisco, EY, KPMG, TCS, and more, came together to swap stories and dive into some seriously interesting panel discussions. The previous edition also witnessed the participation of distinguished luminaries from Salesforce, Upstox, Swiggy, Atlassian, RazorPay, Dell, Oracle, Akamai, and numerous other organizations!
The awards’ selection criteria is as follows:
- Overview of the technology used and how it helped in enhancing candidate experience
- Innovation in using the HackerRank platform
- Impact of the strategies on talent metrics
- Originality and relevance of it in the talent field
On the basis of the selection criteria detailed, HackerRank awards people for the following categories:
- Excellence in Talent Acquisition – Recognizes exceptional talent acquisition teams who have revolutionized the technical hiring experience, leading to enhanced satisfaction among both candidates and hiring teams
- Emerging Talent Accelerator – Recognizes the outstanding teams for their achievements in talent attraction and acquisition strategies
- Innovators in Lateral Tech Hiring – Recognizes trailblazers for their outstanding commitment to hiring lateral talent and delivering exceptional candidate experiences at scale
- The Developers Choice Award – Recognizes the teams who created exceptional interview and assessment experiences for developers
- The Early Careers Transformation Award – Recognizes remarkable dedication in recruiting university and early-stage talent on a significant scale while ensuring an exceptional candidate experience
Besides these, HackerRank also welcomes leaders and organizations in “Innovators Hall of Fame” whose efforts in harnessing the power of HackerRank to effectively help engage, connect, and nurture talent in a candidate-friendly manner.
Winners of HackerRank Innovator Awards 2023
This year, the awards started with an address by Juan Herrera, President of Global Field Operations at HackerRank, where he dove into how the winning organizations are measuring skills over pedigree. He detailed how there’s an increasing demand for skills strategies and tech brand enhancement, and how HackerRank is bridging that gap.
This was followed by a keynote speech by Janardhan Santhanam, VP and Global Head of Talent Development at TCS. The session explored the importance of adaptability, continuous learning, and talent empowerment in today’s dynamic landscape. He also discussed the growing importance of AI in everyday work, and how each AI needs trust and inclusive design.
Following that, an insightful panel discussion titled “The Future of Work: AI and Human Collaboration” took place. The esteemed panelists included Ramkumar Narayan, Vice President of Technology and Managing Director at VMWare; Kailash Nadh, Chief Technology Officer at Zerodha; and Harishankaran K, Chief Technology Officer at HackerRank. The discussion delved into the intricate relationship between AI tools and human engagement in bolstering productivity and streamlining coding tasks. Emphasis was placed on the indispensable role of human input despite the increasing role of AI.
The panelists also explored the significance of reskilling individuals to effectively utilize AI tools, and highlighted the importance of fostering meaningful dialogues. The conversation touched upon the practices of larger corporations adopting AI-powered assessments, juxtaposed with smaller entities that adhere to conventional interview methods.
Post the keynote session, the award ceremony commenced, the winners of which are:
Excellence in Talent Acquisition
Platinum Winner: IBM
Gold Winner – Akamai
Emerging Talent Accelerator
Platinum Winner: Cashfree
Gold Winner: Toshiba
Innovators in Lateral Tech Hiring
Platinum Winner: Goldman Sachs
Gold Winner: Cisco
The Developers’ Choice Award
Platinum Winner: Amazon
Gold Winner: NVIDIA
The Early Careers Transformation Award
Platinum Winner: Atlassian
Gold Winner: Adobe
Gold Winner: Akamai
Innovators Hall of Fame
Platinum Winner: TCS
Gold Winner: HCL
How HackerRank Is Helping the Talent Acquisition community
HackerRank, just like our customers, is driven to create exceptional, inclusive, and safe candidate experiences. Our products enable talent leaders to attract, evaluate, hire, and upskill technical talent from all over the world, and here’s what some of our customers said about us at the event:
“Thank you HackerRank team for enabling us to hire the best talent. I think this is where quality meets quantity.”
Arshad Khan, HR Head, IBM
“Thank you HackerRank for being a great partner, you’ve helped us go beyond the traditional universities too – we’ve scaled our university hiring from 0 to 200 and we’ve also grown Atlassian from 0 to 2000 in the last 5 years with HackerRank”
Arun Viswanathan, Head Of Engineering – IT Operations R&D, Atlassian
“It’s been an amazing experience working with HackerRank, it’s been 5 years now, we used to have a hiring ratio of 20:1 when we started, but now it’s 5:1. We also worked on our recent hackathon, thank you for driving the podcast and making our leaders feel very comfortable”
Vartika Shrivastava, Talent Acquisition India Lead – Engineering, Cisco
The HackerRank Innovator Awards 2023 was a remarkable testament to the power of unity within the tech and talent community. As the event unfolded, it became evident that this gathering was about fostering a vibrant exchange of ideas, experiences, aspirations, and recognizing excellence.
Furthermore, the tech and talent leaders enjoyed great conversations, posed for pictures, and had a great time.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the event and the posts that followed:
