HackerRank is a community platform which ranks programmers based on their coding skills, allowing engineers to hone their skills and companies to find top engineers.

Previously working as software engineers, founders Vivek Ravisankar and Hari Karunanidhi built automatic CodeChallenges as a means of singling out the best coders in the recruitment process, and this ultimately led to the birth of HackerRank!

HackerRank is building a community of ‘hackers’ who will be able to discuss problems, learn, compete and collaborate together. As well as being useful for recruitment, HackerRank also appeal to educators looking to test their students and manage programming assignments. From schools to universities, HackerRank allows educators to auto grade and evaluate the performance of their students with ease, using features like a plagiarism detector which flags up any submission that is 70% similar to that of other students.

HackerRank helps developers of all abilities to

• Sharpen their programming skills
• Take part in challenges in over 35 languages,
• Participate in online hackathons
• Collaborate with an ever-growing community of one million engineers.

As a partner to Grads in Games, HackerRank play a crucial role in our Search for a Star and Rising Star coding competitions. The first round of each competition requires contestants to take a HackerRank coding test, designed by industry experts. The top 25% of scores from each competition continue onto the next round. By ranking all the contestants, HackerRank allows us to identify the most talented student coders to take forward in the competition. In 2015, we found that 75% of students who passed the HackerRank test in Search for a Star ended up graduating into a job in the games industry.

They told us, “We’re passionate about helping young games enthusiasts transform into skilled developers and love seeing competitions like Search For A Star encouraging young coders to get involved. We’re delighted to see that the students benefit from the first round HackerRank test, and we wish them all the best of luck in their future careers!”

We’re grateful to have HackerRank on board; their services help employers to recognise talented coders, and help us put through the very best student programmers in our competition!