It’s time of the year when everyone is on the race to hire top talent from universities. If I were to create a tag cloud for companies it would predominantly have

Flight trips, late night interview sessions, evaluating written test papers, developer’s time taking a stick

For some companies interviewstreet would have also been a part of the tag cloud last year

How do we fit in?

Interviewstreet helps you to create your own online test (programming, multiple-choice, subjective answer questions) and our codechecker helps in assessing the best developers amongst the applied candidates.

Using interviewstreet, you could start your interviews almost instantly after the test, saving a ton of time.

We’ve powered campus placements last season for Amazon, Flipkart, One97 and many more… Read how Flipkart saves 100 days in campus recruitment using Interviewstreet.

We offer a completely customizable and white labeled solution and there’s no bargaining on our customer service – we give you the best!

If you would like us to power your campus placements this season, drop a mail to team@interviewstreet.com and we would be happy to set it up!

No, this isn’t a post about Interviewstreet hiring programmers (even though we are ). There are a lot of companies looking to hire hackers and these are some of my observations if you’re hiring a hacker

Image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/specialkrb/3253320581/sizes/m/in/photostream/

• Hackerish founding team – If not both the founders, at least one of them should be a full-fledged geek
• Working alone - Hackers like to work in a place that’s filled with people who are smarter than them in programming. Asking them to work alone or putting them in the middle of 5 sales guys is a turn off
• Mix of infrastructure and feature requests – If the job involves only coding feature requests from customers, it becomes boring. They should have an opportunity to solve scaling issues / redesigning the web architecture / introducing a caching layer (memcache / apc), etc along with coding interesting features
• They’re likely to start on their own – It can be as soon as 6 months, but they’re likely to build something on their own and launch their own startup
• Freedom and belief – The cheapest hack in a hacker’s textbook is modifying files in server with the root password already known to him. Greater the freedom and belief given, higher the output you receive from them. Don’t hide any code, passwords, etc. – be open
• Interesting problems in interview - The problems asked in the interview creates an impression about the company. The tougher (and challenging) the questions, the respect and interest to work in the place increases.
• Pay / salary – I have seen both types of people – one who’s stubborn about the salary and the other type who doesn’t give a damn about the pay. But I don’t think any conclusion with respect to culture fit could be drawn based on this

Campus Hiring

Campus hiring is a popular way of recruiting freshers and has been fairly effective to get good talent into the company. Typically, around 3 developers and an HR visit a campus, spend almost 1.5 – 2 days for the entire process (pre-placement talks, written test, interviews, etc.). If the company visits 20-25 campuses a year, they are approximately spending 25 * 2 * 4  (campuses * no. of days * no. of people) = 200 days of combined effort (cumulative). That sounds like a lot of time and it is!

About Flipkart

Flipkart is India’s leading e-commerce platform and (proud to say!) have been our customer since the 2nd month of the launch of our product! An amazing company, they are looking for top-notch engineers to join their team and visit a lot of campuses in a year. Growing from a startup phase, the 200 days of cumulative effort is definitely a put off, lets see how we (Interviewstreet) helped them reduce the time.

How Interviewstreet helped them in campus recruitment and saved time

About Interviewstreet
Interviewstreet helps companies screen programmers using custom programming tests. We have built a codechecker that checks candidates’ code for correctness and optimality helping companies identify good programmers from the lot. This serves as a great way to screen candidates in the early stage.

We asked Flipkart for some data and here’s a typical scenario / schedule:

• Average students who attempt a test in campus: 150
• Time to evaluate a single paper: 7 min (best case!)
• Average no. of developers evaluating the paper: 3

Total time spent in manually evaluating papers (hrs): ( (150 * 7) / 3 ) /60  ~= 6 hrs

• Arrive at campus: 9am
• Pre-placement-talk: 9-10 am
• Written Test: 10-12 noon
• Lunch: 12-1300 hrs
• Evaluate written tests: 1300 – 1900 hrs
• Interviews all night and catch a flight next day 9am and arrive at work maybe in the noon and we all know how “productive” that day might be!

Typically 1.5-2 days goes off for every campus recruitment.

Here’s a diagrammatic representation of the original scenario and how it has changed using Interviewstreet

The entire written paper correction is eliminated. Not only is it a pain to manually evaluate papers but also terribly time consuming.

The modified schedule would look like

• Arrive at campus: 9am
• Pre-placement-talk: 9 – 10am
• Online test using Interviewstreet: 10 – 12 noon
• Results: Instant!
• Lunch: 12 – 1300 hrs
• Interviews start at 1300 hrs and take a flight back home the same night!

Flipkart saves almost a day for every campus they visit.

Effectively, Flipkart saves 70-100 (cumulative) days in campus hiring for every year!

Let us know if you would like to use our product [e-mail to: team AT interviewstreet DOT com] and we can get up and running in less than an hour!

It’s interesting how different types of businesses use our product for different needs, although everything falls under the big heading of ‘hiring‘. Cleartrip is a travel site that gives you what you need without any annoying fluff, search, book and go. Moving forward on that mission, they needed smart programmers to build the product. As is the case with a lot of companies, they were pounded with lots of resumes and the filtering process became a tough job. They chose to use Interviewstreet to screen candidates based on their programming skills in Java and here’s what the results are..

Case Study

Before Interviewstreet

A typical funnel that existed earlier is shown below to hire 1 developer:

A typical phone screen would last for 30-40 minutes and add the time for context switch, the developer spends about an hour for every phone interview. This translates to about 15-20 hours spent on phone interviews (on an average) with over 90% of the time resulting in rejecting candidates.

We needed to build a product that was not only easy to integrate with the existing system but also saved a lot of time. Here’s what they had to say about the integration:

“It was very simple and easy to integrate the application. Earlier we had written tests which the candidate would take when they came for a face-to-face interview, Interviewstreet helped the candidate take the test at his convenience thereby saving time for both the prospective employer and the employee”

After using Interviewstreet
Here’s a funnel after using Interviewstreet:

As you might notice, the manual effort (phone interviews) is almost nil and it gives an opportunity to test extra candidates too from the resume pool who might have been in the border-line! All the above with seamless integration to your existing recruitment process.

Effectively,

Cleartrip saves *atleast* 15 hours and probably more (30-40 hours, including the additional candidates tested) for every developer they hire!

If you would also like to use our product, shoot a mail to team@interviewstreet.com, we will get back to you immediately!

Yes, we are hiring developers! But before that, it would be great if you know a little background about Interviewstreet, the growth and what you can expect working with us.

Who are we?

We are Vivek & Hari. We are very nice guys. Okay, if that hasn’t satisfied you, here’s a traditional answer:. To help us move forward, we are backed by some of the most awesome and inspiring people in the startup circuit

The story so far..

We started off Interviewstreet as a platform for conducting mock interviews for students to help them in campus placements. But soon (9 months) found out that there was something wrong with our business model (or) our execution methods were flawed. Bottom-line, we were on the wrong path. Looking back, I really don’t know where from we got that itch to move on, keep moving on until we latch onto something. But we never gave up!

We morphed the idea into a platform to help companies hire / screen programmers. We built a codechecker which would evaluate a candidate’s code on correctness and optimality judging his programming skills.
We launched the new version of Interviewstreet in late July. The 1st cut looked ugly, complaints and bugs all over, but we still had one customer who said ‘I really love your product!‘ – that gave us a big kick! We did a marathon, sat all night, fixed bugs, wrote selenium scripts and made it better. And then more demos, more coding, more features (of course more stability) has led us to an impressive set of customer base featuring some of the big names like Amazon, Cleartrip, Flipkart, One97 etc. (a couple of really big companies are using our product in trial mode right now!)

Our working style

We want to work only with rockstar engineers and we really mean it! We got a lot of resumes but refused to settle to anyone except a real stud – we hired Anand! Incidentally he was our 1st customer for mock interview business – connecting the dots.

The initial months are a struggle in any startup but we have just hatched and understood ourselves better. We are NOT these code monsters who sit in a black room with a coffee maker by the side – no weekends, no movies, etc. We have a life, outside work and expect you to have one too.We take off on weekends.

We don’t have an office space, no VP of sales,etc. and completely transparent. We are very stubborn on providing awesome customer service!. We pay well (cash + equity)

There is complete transparency in what we do.None hides anything from anyone and you are free to ask any questions you like. You are free to comment on any aspect – ‘Why are we doing this?‘, ‘Why are you taking a big salary‘ , etc. if you feel my salary is low, feel free to tell that too!

Type of work

Two words that describe our work:
– Extremely challenging

– Agile

I asked Anand to share some of his thoughts and this is what he had to say…

• Get exposed and work on the latest awesome cutting-edge technologies
  codeigniter, memcached, varnish, jquery, foostack, selenium, blueprint, cross domain iframe hacking (embedabblejs one).
  git, tuning apache -mysql, scalling issues.
  Some hardcore c++, exposure to various languages while adding support to them in codechecker.
• Fun gyaans from vivek
• Incredible code architectural knowledge from hari
• Exposure to the startup environment .. (this tops everything!)
• 95% exciting work … (rest 5% is css, blah blah, though I turn it back to hari most of the times)
• Always open to new ideas and methodologies ( the FIFO idea , the named pipes implementation )
• I get a book every month related to startup / web from Interviewstreet!

You would be exposed to all aspects of programming – back-end, CSS / HTML / PHP, writing test suites, etc. And of course, you are free to join any demo / investor meetings, etc.

Apply now

We are really NOT looking for resumes and definitely not those which have these kind of lines at the start
“Looking for a place where my experience and my personality will add value to the organization and we can mutually benefit and have a healthy growth, etc.”

We have created a buzz already, but would like to make a dent in the universe, are you game? While that may sound dramatic, we really want to be BIG – big in terms of customers, revenue and the value created. We would like the customers to have no other option but to just love us and our product!

If you are pumped up to join us , drop an email saying “hi” to team@interviewstreet.com and we would love to talk to you!