Hack The Box and HackerRank Job Search Board. Why is this Hiring Future?
Today I will raise a rather interesting topic. It will be interesting first of all for IT specialists and HR agents, hunters, if you prefer. I want to speculate about the future of the company's talent hiring process, and why Linkedin and classic resume forms with place and work experience clauses will soon be a thing of the past.
Using the example of two popular sandboxes - Hack The Box and HackerRank, I will try to illustrate for you what the future of talent halves will look like, and also discuss with you whether this is the best form of recruitment in general. We will talk a lot, but I will back everything up with real examples, don't worry. So we will understand each other faster.
For Those Who Don't Know
For those who don't know what Hack The Box and HackerRank are all about, I'll give you a brief overview. These are two educational platforms in the form of a classic sandbox with theoretical foundations on the subject of study, tasks that become more difficult and complex from time to time, and with a leaderboard, users who have achieved maximum results on the platform.
HackerRank specializes in hard skills and general knowledge and skills. Here you can learn the basics of Python, SQL, JavaScript, and even mathematics. The range of tasks is very large and everyone will find something for themselves. Hack The Box is a more niche platform that specializes in information security training. In simple words, it breeds white hackers.
I believe that these platforms are the brightest representatives of what the selection of candidates will look like in the future. Yes, they are not ideal, far from ideal, but this is the direction that has insane prospects, and most importantly, the effectiveness of the search for candidates.
On our website, we often mention these platforms, as they provide an excellent base of skills and knowledge for free (free, but with minor restrictions). But today we want to talk not about what educational value they represent for us, but about a specific element of these two platforms - job search boards.
Why is this Hiring Future?
I sincerely believe that the process of finding and hiring new employees should be accelerated. Now, it can take a month, if not more, from the moment of the first message from the HR recruiter to the official registration. The point is the false stages of selection, testing the skills and knowledge of the candidate. All this is necessary, I do not argue, however, such platforms help to level several stages of selection at once and go straight from the first message from the recruiter to the final meeting of the interview.
This is done primarily for people, for their convenience and comfort, for their confidence, and not for team leads or HR specialists. This form of selection, which we'll talk about today, allows candidates to try many more options for themselves in a shorter time frame, reducing hiring times and increasing interview success rates. Purely mathematically, this is true, regardless of the candidate itself.
Job Search Board
Like any other sandbox, these platforms have a leaderboard. These are the top users who succeeded in something better and more than others - they earned more points for completing some tasks or in general the only ones who completed this task. From such geniuses, each sandbox (and our guys are no exception) makes up its tops of users. I myself studied information security and my good friend was crazy happy when he got into the top 100 users of Hack The Box (for those who do not know, this is quite a worthy achievement).
Hacker Rank Job Board (source)
However, being proud that you are among the top users is not enough. We need some practical application for these figures - the developers thought and added a job search page. This is a classic job page, but it’s not your CV attached to it, like on Linkedin, but a profile with achievements and points. Thus, the employer immediately sees who he is dealing with, sees all the hard skills, all the achievements of the user, and his place among the tops.
Hack The Box - Job Search Board Page (source)
This simplifies the job search for candidates and significantly reduces the time of hiring because there are no tests and verification - the candidate has already proved and shown what he can and how well he can. In this chain, the link of HR recruiters disappears. With all my love for these people, they will not be able to hire and search for employees without a basic understanding of the field of activity, and the maximum role of an HR agent when hiring will be organizing a call from a candidate - a team leader.
Do These Boards Work?
The question is amazing. I will fight right away and honestly, I did not look for a job through these job search boards, as unnecessary, which is why I went to a place where everyone considers themselves smarter than others - Reddit, as well as Quora, where I also read and analyzed other people's opinions.
HackerRank Employment - r/cscareerquetions Reddit Thread (source)
As for the effectiveness of finding a job on HackerRank, I myself have doubts. The point here is two factors. Firstly, HackerRank trains and teaches users about pretty basic things. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does not correlate well with the requirements for candidates on the job search board, where much stronger skills and more knowledge are required.
HackerRank Employment - r/learnprogramming Reddit Thread (source)
Secondly, the point is in the very presence of educational and practical material. There is an excellent article on our website devoted to all the shortcomings of this platform and how you can fix it by making it a competitor to Hack The Box, so I will not dwell here in detail. Let me just say that the vision of the developers is not right if they plan to make the job search board really work.
HackerRank Employment - Quora Thread (source)
HackerRank doesn't have a truly competitive environment between users, and it won't take more than a week to rank first on the leaderboard for a particular skill. For the sake of the experiment, I tried to take the top place in SQL and did it in three days. I took first place on the leaderboard. But there were several hundred such first places. I wrote about this in detail in this article, so if you are interested, be sure to read it a very interesting article.
Hack The Box's job search board looks better and is much more justified and logical. If you look at the leader board, the best and most skilled users of the platform, you won't see hundreds of first places, and you won't see answers on the web if you start searching, which makes each user's place deserved and more valuable not only in the eyes of the users themselves but also in the eyes of employers.
In general, user threads confirm my words both through Hack The Box and from the job board, much more real than HackerRank. It's not even about the capabilities of developers, but about the desire to work with users and create a competitive environment for them for further development and reward them for their efforts.
Hack The Box Employment - r/cybersecutity Reddit Thread (source)
I highly recommend that you read all the threads that I have attached to this article, they reflect not only my opinion but also the opinions of other users. So you get a more comprehensive picture of these two platforms and what they do or don't do for their users.
Conclusion
What do I want to say at the very end? First of all, I would like to turn to the developers of educational platforms, sandboxes, and other related resources and tell them that such simple functions for users play a big role in the educational process. They show that the platform is ready not only to teach the user something and share resources for learning but also to help bring this learning to its final point - employment, freelancing, or business. Pages such as job search pages do a great job of demonstrating this and should increasingly appear on other educational platforms.