An Innovative Platform By The Developers For The Developers: HackerEarth

With the number of tech employment opportunities expected to grow by 12% by 2024, more and more jobs are becoming available to IT professionals looking to get into space. Yet, there is a plethora of app developers who do not get the job they deserve.

HackerEarth, a company started by Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash out of the need to build an entirely meritocratic system using an objective measure for a developer’s skills. Hackerearth has successfully grown into a global community of 2+ million developers, providing innovative solutions to organisations for their innovation management and technical recruitment needs.

We had the opportunity to talk to Sachin Gupta, CEO and Co-founder of HackerEarth who shared the success story of HackerEarth with us.

1.  Could you brief us about how your business model works?

HackerEarth provides enterprise software solutions that help organizations with their innovation management and technical recruitment needs.

HackerEarth Sprint is an innovation management software that helps organizations drive innovation through internal and external talent pools, including HackerEarth’s global community of 2M+ developers. We work with large enterprises, SMBs, Universities, Non-profits and Governments and help them solve their innovation needs.

HackerEarth Recruit is a technical recruitment software that helps in efficient technical talent screening allowing organizations to build strong, proficient teams. Both the products are sold as SaaS.

2.  How do you help enterprises with your innovative solutions?

We have recently launched the second version of our innovation management software. While the earlier product just focussed on crowdsourcing solutions from the developers’ community, the new version will focus on creating a holistic innovation management unit within a company, paving the way for greater creativity and a culture of innovation. The core motivation behind the new version was encapsulating the learnings that we had got through 1000 innovation campaigns over the last 2 years and weave the rich data intelligence into the product. We have also increased our focus on security, customization and verticalization of the product across various industries. In this age of rapid digital disruption, businesses are facing existential business problems, HackerEarth’s innovation management software is an indispensable platform for enterprises to tackle these problems through both internal and external audiences.

3. While designing all the programming courses, what strategies did you follow?

For HackerEarth, the strategy for creating programming courses is to serve two major purposes – to help programmers practise and learn code and to allow them to compete with other programmers through contests. We have created interesting programming challenges with different levels of difficulty which appeal to the global developer community. Our hackathons are a great platform for developers to showcase their talent be it our university level hackathons or the ones we conduct for enterprises. Crowdsourcing is becoming a great way to source ideas and even non-profits are looking at this as a medium for idea generation. This kind of programming format keeps programmers engaged and they actually look forward to more contests on the platform. We also have a platform to help programmers practise and learn code. Here the range of learning varies from basic concepts such as Algorithms and Data structures to more advanced ones like Machine Learning.

4. Do you plan to expand your brand presence across other countries?

Yes, we are currently looking at expanding our brand presence across other countries with a focus of US, pockets of Europe and South East Asia. Though India is our biggest market currently, we have seen good traction and response from the programming challenges and hackathons that we have conducted in these geographies.

5. Share the biggest achievement of your company to date?

To narrow down on one achievement would be tough as we had several notable achievements since the inception of HackerEarth. Few of the significant ones include building our 1.9 million strong global developer community in just 5 years from scratch. We have moved on to providing solutions to customers not only from the technology sectors but also from technology agnostic sectors such as manufacturing, retail and pharma. We have several of our customers innovate better by embracing technology and this has been another big achievement for us. In the last two years, we have worked with almost 275 Enterprise customers and have helped them solve over 900 business problems. We have helped generate over 50,000 ideas and more than 15,000 solutions have been delivered across various business and technology domains.

6. Where do you see your industry going in next five years?

We believe we are in a rapidly growing industry. Industries across segments are being disrupted by technology at a rapid pace. As a result, every company needs to respond to this change and innovate in real time. This means that organizations need to have a way by which they can ideate and rapidly prototype new solutions and business opportunities. As the industry matures, businesses will have to develop more structured processes to drive innovation across organization leveraging both internal and external stakeholders.

7. What makes you different from your competitors?

We have a 1.9 million bustling developer community with developers from over 57 countries backed by robust platforms to drive innovation. We have also recently launched Startup Connect, a one of a kind initiative where enterprises can host innovation challenges for business problems and startups can participate in these challenges. Shortlisted startups can get a chance to work with enterprises and co-create solutions. We currently have over 500 startups signed up for the programme and we are expecting many more to join by the end of the year.

8. Two suggestions for the aspiring entrepreneur and upcoming startups?

Don’t’ get too hung up about ideas, focus on execution

Build a loyal and committed team, there is very little that founders can do on their own.

9. Hackerearth currently provides technical recruitment. Do you plan to expand across other domains too?

HackerEarth also provides a platform for innovation management. We believe that innovation needs to be the mainstay for organizations to thrive and stay ahead of the competition. Our innovation platform makes sure that innovation and strategic ideas do not stay only within the realms of an organization’s boardroom. Instead, by allowing employees, customers, partners, and the community innovate together, we help businesses be the best at what they do.