We have 1M registered programmers on our technical recruitment platform: HackerRank co-founder Harishankaran K

Bangalore- and California-based Interview Street Inc. offers a technical recruiting platform for enterprises under the brand name HackerRank and a social platform for coding challenges. It had raised $9.2 million in its Series B round of funding from existing investor Khosla Ventures and US-based VC firm Battery Ventures in June 2014. Techcircle.in spoke to its co-founder Harishankaran K to understand its journey, business traction and how it plans to grow further.

How have you utilised the funds raised from Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures last year? Are you looking at more funding?

We have spent the money in building a team. We have scaled up from 2 employees in 2010 to 120 in 2015 with 80 members in the US and 40 in India.

Currently we are not actively looking for fresh funding.

The company started as a technical recruitment solutions provider followed by a social platform for coding challenges. Are you planning to add new areas to the list of services?

We would like to explore all the verticals in computer science domain followed by other engineering branches.

How many programmers do you have across the globe and how many of those are from India?

We have about 1 million programmers on our platform out of which 45 to 50 per cent come from India. We figured out that sourcing is a bigger challenge than filtering so we assess the candidates and approach the companies offering the best out of the lot. That is the value add we provide.

What is the revenue model of the company?

Companies need to buy a recruiter license and use it to test candidates using the platform. One recruiter license provides 100 candidates to be invited and tested using the platform.

For HackerRank community platform, if a company uses the platform for conducting an online contest, they pay us for using the platform.

How are Indian companies adopting to the technical recruitment platform?

There are about 1,000 companies on our platform with Indian firms such as Cleartrip, Flipkart, Myntra and Practo. The startups are particularly excited about the product as the time spent in the hiring process comes down significantly.

Apart from DroidRank for Android development, which are the­ verticals that the company plans to venture into?

Image processing, dev ops, system administrator, security engineers and big data, which is getting lot of traction right now, are different verticals we are eyeing at so that irrespective of a role, companies can leverage HackerRank in order to hire engineers.

Can you share the year on year growth rate with us?

HackerRank community is growing at 40 per cent every year.