- The Company Has Now Served a Global Community of More Than 18 Million Developers.
HackerRank, the developer skills company, announced the results of a tremendous year for the company’s technical hiring platform and developer community, exceeding its plan with 72% YoY growth in ARR in 2021. The number of developers who have used the company’s platform to practice their skills and interview for jobs grew to more than 18 million.
Fueling this momentum is a global talent shortage and growing demand for skilled developers across all industries. In December 2021 alone, the U.S. unemployment rate for IT jobs dipped to an astonishing 2% — nearly half of the national unemployment rate of 4%. At the same time, organizations upped their search for additional technical talent: across industries, there were an estimated 332,564 job postings for open tech positions in the U.S. in December 2021 — 22,500 more than the month prior, reaching the highest monthly total since March 2020.
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Addressing a Global Talent Shortage
In order to gain a competitive edge, companies across the world are investing in their technical hiring processes to add efficiencies and refine the candidate experience, with HackerRank serving as the standard in technical skills assessments. As of the end of 2021, HackerRank has assessed software developers around the world with more than 188 million technical challenges and code submissions, hitting a record of 10 million submissions in August 2021 alone. To date, the company is a provider of choice for more than 2,800 global organizations, a number which grew 36% over the past year. Today, the company serves more than 25% of the Fortune 100.
The increase in activity comes as companies across the world adjust to a remote-first world of work and compete for candidates amidst an ongoing talent crisis that is expected to reach a shortage of 85.2 million workers across the globe by 2030. Left unchecked, that talent shortage could result in about $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues by 2030.
“HackerRank’s fundamental mission is to accelerate the world’s innovation, and we believe that software developer shortages and the reliance on pedigree over skills are significant bottlenecks to that innovation,” said Vivek Ravisankar, co-founder and CEO of HackerRank. “We want to remove the barriers for businesses to find talent, no matter where that talent might come from. As labor shortages create increased demand, the moment presents an opportunity for those of us in tech to expand our notions of what we think a developer might look like or how they should pick up their skills.”
Growth In Demand of Developer Assessments
Supply and demand pressure in the tech labor market has led to unprecedented competition for tech roles across all skill levels. With the stakes higher than ever to secure talent with the right technical capabilities, HackerRank has seen increased usage of its assessments across all experience levels. In 2021, the company saw an almost equal distribution of these types of assessments between experienced candidates and early talent (those with fewer than three years of job experience).
In order to assess more experienced developers, assessments themselves are evolving to better test nuanced skill sets in complex technical environments. In 2021, HackerRank saw 93% growth in the use of its project-based assessments, which provide companies and candidates a fully virtual and collaborative IDE. In this environment, they can pair-program and complete live coding assessments that recreate the real-world technical challenges a candidate might encounter in the role. This sandbox environment allows companies to conduct dynamic technical assessments, while giving candidates a more realistic glimpse into the technical and organizational culture of the company.
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Product Innovations to Meet Evolving Developer Needs
To address growing demand, HackerRank has brought a number of product enhancements and features to the market over the past year to best serve interviewees and hiring teams alike. Those updates include:
- Expanding Content Library: The company introduced 10 new roles and 35 new skills, bringing its total content library to 27 roles, 100 skills and more than 3,100 questions. The company hosts the largest assessment content library in the world, with recent additions including support for the Laravel PHP web framework and cutting-edge roles such as Machine Learning Engineer and Data Analyst.
- Plagiarism Detection and Protection: After noting a 37% increase in plagiarism attempts, HackerRank invested in machine-learning plagiarism detection tools to look beyond code similarity. The company’s industry-leading algorithm evaluates behavioral signals such as candidate score, submission timeframe and consistency across different versions of a programming language to monitor for cheating.
- New Integrations: In order to streamline technical hiring into mainstream systems that its customers use, HackerRank expanded its technical integrations to 30 partners, with notable additions of Webex and Eightfold.ai in 2021.
- Enhanced User Experience: Throughout 2021, the company investested heavily in enhancing the experience of candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers. Major efforts included helping organizations elevate their hiring maturity by organizing their interview processes in a consistent manner and save time evaluating design skills with preconfigured whiteboard drawings.
- Democratizing Tech Hiring: HackerRank released a free version of its online interviewing tool to make it easier for developers across the world to interview qualified, top-tier talent in an easy-to-use and collaborative environment. The integrated video conference and development environment provides access to pre-qualified tests, a virtual whiteboard and diagramming tools to enable more experiential technical interviews by developers, for developers.
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