UPDATES ON HACKERRANK SOURCING

To Kriszta and Eric, as I love your commitment so much! 

Ermm… HackerRank?!

HackerRank is a wonderful global platform to identify developers who work on various coding challenges and compete with each other.

Profiles usually look like this ⬇️ or contain even less information. 

As you see, long Boolean searches will not yield results (as developers tend to say very little about themselves on this platform) so we definitely need to find new ways to unearth potential candidates.

HackerRank Contests ANd Challenges

For a long time, HackerRank users were x-rayable via Google by using this formula: site:hackerrank.com/profile/ “United States”. This, however, is gone by now. HackerRank seems to have blocked all indexing by Google on their user profiles. 

Browsing within the Contests and the Challenges sections though is still there and it can give some great starting points for our search.

The assumption is simple: engineers belonging to the same coding challenge (or contest) may have something in common. A shared skill? Shared coding interest? Similar challenges they work on during their job? Once we find one potential profile we can look around and see who else is playing the same contest with that person. 

There are four ways how we can find relevant contests and challenges:

• Create a free Job Seeker profile, go to Contests and use the Filters on the right-hand-side panel to select the programming language you are after. Here you’ll find Contests only
• Without a profile, visit the this link and use Filters the same way

• Run an x-ray search like this: site:hackerrank.com/contests python or like this: site:hackerrank.com/challenges python (change the programming language/topic per your need)
• Locate a user profile (like him) and go down to the Submissions part. This section displays every former Contest and Challenge where a user had created their submissions. Open the hyperlinks!

SOURCING ON HACKERRANK

Once you open a Contest/Challenge you’ll see quite some information. The most important part from here is probably the description (which explains the coding challenge) and the leaderboard.

THE LEADERBOARD IS A PIECE OF GOLD!

It’s displaying every player with their ranking so we can clearly see who is the best developer on a certain challenge. It’s that type of intel that you definitely want to share with your Hiring Manager. …and there’s more! 

The Leaderboard view varies for Contests and for Challenges. Often, this list does not only contain usernames and the ranking info but also the country emoji of the player and the programming language they used when creating their challenge submission. BAAAANG!!!!

In other views, you’ll have a panel on the right where you can filter the leaderboard players via their programming language or countries or companies or schools. Note that programming languages here have their HackerRank naming convention: cpp for C++ or csharp for C# and so on. 😉 

SCRAPING LEADERBOARD PLAYERS

These leaderboard views are easily scrapeable with Instant Data Scraper. Locate “Next Button” to grab the whole list! 

Once the list is scraped you can filter them in a Spreadsheet – the emoji flags will have a link as you see on the below screenshot (flag src). This list, for instance, contains 1,912 players from the Even-odd Boxes challenge where more than 1,000 of them are C++ (pardon! cpp) developers. 

Once you have them all in a Spreadsheet, you can look them up by using our recently published Candidate Lookup Tool. Or you visit the HackerRank profiles as many of them show their LinkedIn and/or Github pages, too. 

X-RAYING HACKERRANK LEADERBOARDS 

Although I think scraping is the best (and quickest) solution to utilize HackerRank for sourcing, it’s still possible to x-ray the leaderboard information. I leave a few options here for your inspiration, the rest will be easy-peasy! 

site:hackerrank.com/challenges python inurl:leaderboard “United States * python”

site:hackerrank.com/contests inurl:leaderboard Hungary AROUND(10) python

site:hackerrank.com/contests inurl:leaderboard “India * C++14”

Happy Sourcing! 🙂

Image source: https://mechomotive.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/HackerRank2.png