Online marketplace for talent discovery & recruitment HackerEarth rolls out tool to conduct hackathons

HackerEarth, an online marketplace for talent discovery and recruitments, has launched a tool for conducting coding tests and hackathons. Called HackerEarth Sprint, the tool aims to automate the entire process of conducting such sprints- starting from creating teams; online collaborative development among participants; showcasing of products; tracking progress; and peer review/voting; to judging the submissions.

Using the tool, Participants can also link with online platforms like Github, Heroku, and AWS, etc. for code hosting and deployment. Going forward, Sprint will also be integrated with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, so that the entire activity during the hackathons can be driven socially.

"Hackathons are being leveraged to bring the developer community together. They are already an effective hiring strategy for companies of all scales. Furthermore, technical recruitment companies are facing challenges due to a fragmented developer community," said Vivek Prakash, co-founder and CTO of HackerEarth.

"Until now, we lacked the technology which makes these massive marathons easy to manage. HackerEarth Sprint aims to simplify this process for our customers," added Sachin Gupta, co-founder and CEO of HackerEarth.

Leading technology companies regularly conduct coding contests and hackathons to engage with the programmer community within the organisation and outside. HackerEarth has already partnered with companies such as Wipro and Pearson to host hackathons as part of their inter-company engagement.

The startup was founded in November 2012 by IIT Roorkee alumni Gupta and Prakash. Owned and operated by Bangalore-based CareerStack Innovation Pvt Ltd, HackerEarth helps organisations discover the best technical talent through its network of developers, who are indexed and ranked by their skills and automatically validated by mining their online social and professional data. Its community of developers solve problems, learn programming concepts, and compete in programming challenges.

HackerEarth's assessment tool also allows recruiters to quickly and automatically filter developers, using skill based assessment tests. The firm claims that a recruiter can save time by automating the assessment process. In February last year, the firm had secured $500,000 from startup incubator AngelPrime, with participation from existing investor GSF Accelerator.