Insurance as a Craft and Its Digital Transformation, With Chubb’s Mohan Narayanaswamy
Dec 22, 2021
Insurance is not traditionally regarded as a craft. But Mohan Narayanaswamy says otherwise.
“Insurance is a very personal thing and we, at Chubb, are craftsmen of it,” he said.
Narayanaswamy’s illustrious career in tech began in Phillips back in 1985, when the software industry was booming with opportunities thanks to the growing popularity of personal computing. Today, he oversees a wide range of digital services, from Intelligent Process Automation to Data Analytics and Cat Modeling, at the world’s largest publicly traded P&C insurance company.
HackerRank’s Senior Director of Marketing, Aadil Bandukwala, recently had the opportunity to chat with the tech leader to learn more about what makes an excellent insurance provider, what dictates Chubb’s work culture and the tech stack the company wields to address challenges the insurance industry faces today.
Have a listen to their conversation on HackerRank Radio, or read on for some interesting takeaways from the episode.
1. The (Insurance) Revolution is Happening
The insurance industry has historically been a little slow to adapt to technological trends, but Chubb has set itself apart.
Though the company was founded almost 140 years ago, it has thwarted apparent threats and ridden many industry-transforming waves successfully — one of which was digital transformation.
“Being digitally aligned is one of the strategic priorities of Chubb,” said Narayanaswamy. “As an insurance company, we are in the business of managing risk and we heavily rely on data analytics and insights to make informed decisions here.”
The company’s investment in data intelligence is a small piece of a much larger relationship with digital transformation Chubb Studio, the company’s one-stop online shop for insurance, is one great example of this bigger picture. The platform enables Chubb’s partners to build and deliver Chubb insurance products easily and quickly, all on the web. Providing integrations through microsites, widgets and APIs, Chubb Studio aims to embody its tagline: “Digital insurance in a box.”
The problems that Chubb’s solving for today have plagued the industry for a while. “Enhancing agents’ and customers' online experience, simplifying and streamlining insurance distribution, automating the underwriting process, improving analytical data quality, and cybersecurity are a few of the problems we are working on,” said Narayanaswamy. By addressing these pertinent issues, the company is helping the industry at large move in a forward direction.
2. Changing the Image of Insurance
For a long time, insurance and insurance companies have been met with a lack of understanding and trust in the public eye.
What makes a great insurance provider? “Great underwriting, risk engineering capabilities and a speedy claims process,” Narayanaswamy said. Chubb keeps its focus on all three.
The company serves a diverse customer base and operates in 54 countries. (You can find a Chubb insurance policy just about anywhere.) For such a global company, Chubb has a focus on localness and personalization in order to provide the right policy and establish trust in insurance at large.
“Keeping every individual, family or business’s needs at the forefront, we build insurance policies from scratch with precision and expertise. We truly are craftsmen of insurance,” said Narayanaswamy.
3. The Tech Team That’s Makes It Happen
What are the tools that Chubb’s tech teams work with? Cybersecurity, customer experience and risk management are all critical components that the company factors in, which warrants industry-standard tools and frameworks.
“We work with .NET, Azure, Python, and frontend technologies like Angular, React and Node.js,” Narayanaswamy said. “We also have a few industry-standard ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading), RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and IPA (Intelligent Process Automation) tools, reporting and BI tools, test automation frameworks, and data-related technologies like SQL in our tech stack.”
The company’s modern tech stack is another example of its commitment to digital transformation, but keeping up with the latest technologies, especially from a skills perspective, can be challenging for employees. But Chubb has some dedicated resources to help the team out.
“We provide a range of learning opportunities for employees,” said Narayanaswamy. “Through our Global Chubb Talent Portal, they have access to a huge digital library of courses on business management, professional development, technologies and just about anything that they would want to upskill in.”
Though the company’s teams are spread across the world, they’ve realized that leading by example is a strategy that succesfully unifies the team and builds a stronger work environment.
“Chubb executives take accountability, passionately stand behind our company promises and value differences to set the stage for our employees,” Narayanaswamy said.
From Zero to Sixty: How BukuWarung Scaled Its Engineering Team during Rapid Growth
Nov 11, 2021
Fintech is booming in Indonesia — and one 2-year-old startup is accelerating the adoption of digital bookkeeping in the country. BukuWarung is a bookkeeping and digital payments startup for Indonesia’s micro, small and medium businesses. It was founded in 2019 when a vacation in Indonesia opened the founders’ eyes to the lack of digitalization of business processes in many small stores, which were still using pen and paper to keep records.
The startup’s growth has been spectacular. It’s already amassed 6.5 million registered stores, and currently handles $2 billion USD in annualized digital payments.
Such impressive growth begs a number of crucial questions: How do they structure their teams? How did they scale past their PMF (Product Market Fit) phase? How have they scaled their hiring efforts? BukuWarung’s Vice President of Engineering Rajesh Chandrashekaran recently sat down with our Senior Director of Marketing Aadil Bandukwala to unpack these questions in full. Have a listen here, or read on for some takeaways.
1. Be very customer-focused
Aadil Bandukwala:
Some think that the most challenging period for a company is when they’re trying to go from idea to MVP. What's your definition of this phase—the product-market fit phase, what did this look like at BukuWarung, and at what stage is the company currently at?
Rajesh Chandrashekaran:
Before I answer this, let me provide some context on BukuWarung itself, because a large part of our audience may not know what we do. The word BukuWarung can be split into two - Warung means shop, and Buku refers to bookkeeping.
BukuWarung is building the digital infrastructure for about 16 million MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) in Indonesia. We have a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor, which is a testament to our vibrant people-centric culture. The app has 6.5 million registered merchants in more than 750 cities, and we also recently did about 2 billion USD in annualized digital payments. We are on a journey to becoming a super app of sorts for merchants. We began by providing just bookkeeping services, but merchants can now take care of things like utilities, transferring money, taking loans, and much more. Our app has a 4.4 rating on the play store.
Our journey began early in 2019. While traveling to Indonesia, the founders Chinmay and Abhinay noticed many shopkeepers writing their dues on a piece of paper. It surprised them, as people who regularly use finance-related apps like Splitbuy. They dived deep into this by talking to a lot of merchants, around 400 of them though I don't know the exact number. They discovered that this segment was clearly underserved and then began building an app to solve this problem.
It took about a week to build, and soon after, the founders organized a merchant community event in Jakarta. It wasn’t very big or fancy—there were about 60 merchants sitting in a room listening to the app’s builders. They provided feedback and after these improvements were implemented, it launched on the play store. They got 50 downloads in one day, most of the downloaders were the merchants they met earlier to discuss their problem. These merchants were the sounding board for them.
They were able to reach about 10k merchants within two months and achieved a 94% monthly retention. For an app among thousands that are being launched every day on the play store, that's a pretty good number. The main takeaway from this story is during the PMF phase, if you’re constantly and carefully listening to user problems and connecting with them, your idea will work out really well. Be very customer-focused.
2. Good Talent Comes From Everywhere
Aadil Bandukwala:
What do you look for when hiring tech talent?
Rajesh Chandrashekaran:
What we specifically look for, considering we’re a startup, is high energy levels, an eagerness to learn, and an ability to think and scale fast.
From a process point of view, this translates to a HackerRank test, followed by a few technical and personal interviews. During the interview with a hiring manager, there’s a lot of focus on values - having a strong ownership attitude and being able to move fast, and our company culture. I think those are, among other things, fundamental to finding a good fit. We also believe that good talent comes from everywhere. So we don't pay a lot of attention to the candidate’s past professional experience if they’ve worked with big brands etc. We filter through these to see what the person has to offer to us.
We have a very strong engineering culture—we do weekly architectural design reviews, biweekly tech talks, and we take pride in our engineering engine, so we look for folks that resonate with this kind of culture. We don’t want to have our engineering simply hacking things together, we want to build quality products from the ground up.
3. Retrospect, Try, Refine, and Repeat.
Aadil Bandukwala:
In the flurry of activity during the initial stages of a company, process management is often forgotten. According to you, when should companies look into their processes specifically and how should they go about setting it up?
Rajesh Chandrashekaran:
I've seen several different models, like day-to-day and sprints. In the earlier days of a company, there’s a lot of things people figure out and do on the fly but the consequence of this is that releases get delayed and the process is very loose in general.
Over time, you develop a culture of iterating looking at retrospectives, and actively figuring out what you can do better. Optimizing the process comes naturally, but this also tends to be a little slow. You’ll have to spend some time balancing the old and the new, and figuring out what to keep and what not to keep.
There's always a scope to improve and learn, right? So, having a mindset of continuous improvement is really the best way to think about processes. Retrospecting, trying, refining, and repeating is the process of how to get to where you want to be.
Zeta’s on a Mission to Make Payments Invisible
Mar 31, 2021
By 2022, invisible payments are expected to reach a whopping $78 billion in annual transactions.
Part of this is due to the boom of digital payments during the pandemic. And Zeta—a company rethinking payments from core to the edge—is benefiting from this boom.
We invited Ramki Gadipatti, Co-Founder & CTO of Zeta to chat about the fascinating innovations coming from fintech and why Zeta is on a mission to make payments invisible.
Read on for some takeaways from the interview or listen to it here:
1. Why Zeta plans to make payments invisible
Payments are typically an elaborate process, involving lots of steps and verifications—making it impossible for the user to not feel its presence.
Zeta’s aim is to shrink this payment experience so the user won’t feel like it exists and use technology to speed up and minimize the authentications and validations involved.
Today, they’re spreading the phenomenon of invisible payments through players in the banking and financial industries. They help these organizations realize their ambitions, like reaching audiences their products haven’t been able to reach until now.
Financial institutes need systems to run their banking products. These systems are usually referred to as core banking products. All the physical branches of these institutions are connected in these products—including customers’ transactions, balances, and fraud detection. These systems are quite outdated and in desperate need of an upgrade.
If a bank were to conceive a product, they need to think about the integration and manifestation of that single product across 30 systems. This process itself could take anywhere between 8 and 18 months and sometimes the product might not even see the light of day!
As technology pervades every aspect of consumers’ lives and continues to make everything easier and quicker, consumers obviously expect their banks and other financial institutions they depend on to level up as well. The pace of the systems needs to be matched with the pace of the customer.
Zeta is on a mission to solve these challenges.
2. How Zeta is innovating fintech
Tachyon, a product of Zeta, is reducing financial institutes’ time-to-market from several years to a few days of support. They’re providing an integrated platform of payments and core banking services as a SAAS to give banks a faster time-to-market and make them future-ready. With this offering, banks don’t have to worry about buying and integrating 10 different systems to offer new products to their customers anymore.
Banks used to look at distribution as purely geographical—having a presence in a certain number of locations. Wherever they’re located is where their business takes place. With the rise of digital financial services, the user base is no longer restricted to physical locations. Platforms like Whatsapp, Swiggy, and Twitter are the distribution channels for the banks of the future and Fusion enables financial institutions to reach these channels and participate in the fintech revolution.
3. Diving into the tech stack
Zeta’s tech stack enables them to achieve maximum security and performance at the foundation.
At the bottom-most layer, Zeta has its complete operations and computing infrastructure platform called Olympus.
Their entire posture on the cloud is completely opaque to the cloud service provider because they’re dealing with extremely sensitive data. They have a zero-trust architecture at the foundation that deals with a lot of Kubernetes, OpenWhisk, Spark, Presto, and more.
Some languages they use include Java and Golang, but the engineers that deal with this layer don’t give the languages as much importance as they do to the raw solutions and algorithms to the complex questions. Some examples of questions include: How do I manage several data centers coming together? How do I respond to an issue in production swiftly?
On the top of the stack, they have a product framework layer where they deal with, for example, the scalability of banks’ accounting systems. Handling 30,000 TPS (transactions per second) is very different and much more complex than serving 30,000 web requests per second.
They do a lot of component engineering, library engineering, and so on. There are engineers working in Vue.js and React Native for the front end and they also have their own native frameworks for delivering UI.
With the problems the Zeta engineering team faces and the platforms they work on, the teams are always having conversations based around architecture and design, understanding the complex business space they serve, and debating the viability of a solution in the short and long term.
How HackerRank Helped Manulife Save $200k+ By Bringing Developers Careers to Life
Dec 01, 2020
When people with a passion for technology get together, they create things that change the world.
That’s the framework for hiring engineers at Manulife Financial Corporation. We sat down (virtually, of course) with Naveed Zahid, Director, Engineering Transformation and Liana Calleri, Talent Acquisition Consultant to discuss how Manulife leverages HackerRank to provide unlimited opportunities for their engineers to develop and succeed throughout their careers.
Listen to the full interview hosted by Aadil Bandukwala, Director of Marketing at HackerRank, or read below for the highlights.
1. How do you provide unlimited opportunities for your employees to develop and succeed?
Liana Calleri
We really are on a digital transformation journey and a big foundation of that is the talent within technology.
About two years ago, we created an IT career framework at Manulife to attract, develop, and retain IT talent. It really aligned with what a lot of other tech companies were doing and continued to follow as well. This framework continues to provide dual career tracks for managers and subject matter experts. It’s enabling us to have a dynamic work environment and provide a win-win for the employees and the company.
We’re also using a ton of different technologies, including JavaScript, React, Node.js, GraphQL, JMeter, New Relic, and Azure to name a few.
Culture matters here. And we are sure to tie this into as an opportunity to develop and succeed. Especially in these times, we are staying connected and engaged as much as we can.
2. What does it really take to bring developers' careers to life?
Naveed Zahid
At Manulife, we focus on having a number of key initiatives that narrow in on that career development of our engineers—which should be front and center for being competitive and innovative in this industry.
Our IT career framework allows our engineers to have very clear expectations of not only what the role entails, but more importantly, how do they get promoted in our organization. So that's the foundation we have established at Manulife to help embrace that idea.
But it goes beyond that. Manulife invests heavily in the learning and growth of our employees with Manulife University. This two-week program offers various different streams including software engineering, quality engineering, reliability engineering, performance engineering, platform engineering and security engineering programs.
But what sets Manulife University apart is that it’s both practical and hands on. We have something called a “proof of technology” where after they've completed their learning phase, they have the opportunity to apply the technologies they were just taught. This is where technologies like React, GraphQL, AKS, and New Relic really come into play. Not only do we teach them, but they get to actually use it. This framework has been highly successful at Manulife.
To us, building that engineering community and culture at Manulife really is important. We conduct internal hackathons that we run quarterly, and strive to celebrate our engineers so we can ensure they’re collectively working together to build great things and innovate.
3. Can you share a couple key metrics that matter the most as an engineering leader?
Naveed Zahid
Recruiting for engineers is so competitive right now. And finding the right individual is even harder.
One of the holy grail metrics that we look at from a recruiting standpoint is trying to minimize the overall time required within the hiring process for both the interviewer and candidate. This keeps our engineers focused on their work and allows us to stay constantly competitive with other tech companies that are trying to attract top talent individuals. The golden standard for us is less than two weeks from that initial contact to that offered letter.
Additionally, we are trying to find opportunities for automating the onboarding experience for our engineers—so the overall experience is exceptional for our future employees. For us, it’s all about how to minimize time-to-attract talent as much as possible. We also try to capture those metrics and opportunities to improve our recruiting process overall.
Liana Calleri
I want to point out, this is not just about talent acquisition. This is implementing company-wide diversity and inclusion efforts as well. Over the next two years, Manulife and John Hancock are investing more than $3.5 million to promote this diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace and in the communities we serve. So it’s a really dynamic time to be a part of something like this.
The goals are threefold:
Increase the representation of diverse talent at all levels in the organization.
Create greater inclusion across the company through our enhanced training.
Support organizations helping POC communities.
We also have initiatives like Women in Tech and mentorship programs that all tie back to retention and enhancing our engineering program, so our engineers can thrive in their careers.
4. How does HackerRank fit into your hiring process?
Liana Calleri
I would say one of the most important aspects of how we hire here at Manulife is to minimize bias in our hiring practices. HackerRank allows us to remove bias and focus on the technical competence of the individual.
Using the unbiased scoring system, we can achieve this because candidates can complete tests at home and on their own schedule. This has been a great success for us as a hiring company.
5. How are you measuring the success of the HackerRank platform?
Naveed Zahid
The goal was to leverage the Developer Skills Platform to ensure a solid hiring strategy for our engineering teams. During the Plan phase of the Developer Skills Platform, we started looking at our overall roles and levels at Manulife, leveraging that IT career framework.
HackerRank has enabled us to start curating tests that we are sending out as part of our at-home assessment and leveraging it for our Codepair* entries.
This simplified scoring mechanism has made it so much easier for our recruiters and hiring managers to identify that top talent with a high level of confidence and eliminate any bias.
For the Interview phase, we leverage Codepair* as part of our engineering hiring panel. This allowed us to interact with our candidates as naturally as possible to assess their skills and see how they collaborate with the engineers in our organization. This is really important at Manulife because we have situations where our engineers have to pair with other engineers.
We love how we’re able to capture feedback from multiple interviewers at the same time, which is really instrumental at minimizing that bias during that Codepair* interview.
We're really excited about applying the Rank feature in how we're identifying talent and selecting candidates. I know that functionality was just recently introduced, but we are really excited to start embedding that as part of our process as well.
To date, we have completed about 230 Codepair* interviews. And while those numbers are great, we wanted to look at it from a return on investment perspective.
At Manulife, we’ve calculated a savings of about $215,000 since 2019 because HackerRank allows us to feel confident that we're only bringing candidates that we feel have the skills that we're looking for, as well as the fit to that Codepair* interview. So, when you start taking a look at the overall return on investment, we do feel that HackerRank has been widely successful at Manulife.
How Blackstone Scales Developer Hiring to Create a Positive Economic Impact & Long-term Value
Oct 21, 2020
A talented developer is valuable on their own. But an even more valuable developer is one that works well with others.
That’s how John Stecher, Chief Technology Officer at Blackstone, determines a qualified candidate. “You want a team of people that can actually work together to produce more than the sum of the parts,” says John. “We look for folks that can collaborate well and help each other out.”
Our own APAC Marketing Director, Aadil Bandukwala, spoke with John to learn more about how Blackstone weaves innovation into their tech hiring program and how HackerRank has successfully up-leveled the quality of candidates coming through the door.
Read the Q&A below for high-level insights or listen to the full podcast here.
What is your vision for Blackstone Technology and Innovations?
I want Blackstone to be viewed as a firm that has world-class technologists when compared to other leading companies in financial services. It’s extremely important to me that folks have an inherent curiosity about financial services, especially as we continue to ramp up hiring over the next few years.
Our technology team plays a key role in accelerating Blackstone to be one of the top investment firms in the world. We do this by building and deploying tools and systems that empower our professionals to be as productive as possible. So the more productive we make our team, the more hours we can dedicate to bringing value to our customers.
Time is the one element in life you never get back. And to me, that's what a lot of technology is. Technology enables people to devote more time to do better work.
Another key pillar in my overall vision from a technology perspective is our Cybersecurity practice. Protecting our clients’ information is absolutely paramount. As we continue to bolster that team, my hope is to implement security into everything we do.
The third pillar is to become a lot more data-centric. As a private equity firm, Blackstone does business with a number of firms that generate very interesting data that can actually help us improve the performance of those companies—as well as help us source new investments down the road.
The fourth element is continuing to become a better team. Teamwork is the key to doing your best work. You need to work hard, you need to have hard conversations, but ultimately, you need to have each other's back throughout the whole thing. It’s important to build a team that has more of a military mindset of working towards the same goal together. And the more you work for each other, the more likely you are to adopt that mentality.
What are your core values? How are those values weaved into Blackstone Technology and Innovations?
We are forward-thinking problem solvers who can take projects from idea to implementation. I think that’s where we shine: taking ideas from customers and clients of the firm as well as portfolio companies, distilling them down, and building what matters to them. That is really one of the core things we do here. You have to have forward-thinking people, people that understand the problem space, and want to work in it to execute.
We have a very open culture that empowers our colleagues to grow, share ideas, and make a significant impact on the firm. From day one, analysts can come in and have an impact.
Although our team is not small by any standards, the impact somebody can have at Blackstone Technology and Innovations on day one versus at a classic technology company is critical. And I believe that from day one, everyone should contribute to the success of the firm.
Our values involve openness, excellence, and teamwork. We specialize in identifying diverse business challenges across the firm and building the right solutions to drive Blackstone's success. Sometimes it is building our own solution, other times it requires bringing in external solutions.
I believe good engineers can balance prioritizing a client’s needs and being a team player. When you work with so many diverse professionals across the organization, you really have to understand them in order to work together, know what you’re good at, and what you're not good at.
What are the skills and qualities that are a requirement to be hired at Blackstone?
We recruit from a broad range of schools, companies, and countries—including all the top engineering schools in the US. But what we really want to bring in is more than skills. One of the best things you can bring in the door is the diversity of viewpoints. So when we're hiring, we aim to bring in lateral talent and newly hired talent that really has a broad diversity of viewpoints across the board, because that truly helps you build the best solution.
We want to bring together a broad perspective on how to solve problems. So, problem solvers that have diverse backgrounds are really what we look for upfront.
Beyond that, we look for people that really value working together as a team. There is the whole concept out there around acquiring the “10x developer.” In my personal experience with the 10x developer, they actually have a net negative multiplying effect on the teams around them. Because they struggle to work with others well. Now there is, of course, the unicorn 10x developer out there that does it really well.
But for the most part, you want a team of people that can actually work together to produce more than the sum of the parts. And so, we look for folks that can collaborate well and help each other out. And we look for folks that can communicate and understand complex conversations and concepts that exist in the financial services world.
Beyond that, we look for candidates who are inquisitive, client-centric, dedicated, transparent, and innovative. But if you really take a step back, what I look for is somebody that doesn't just stop at good enough, it's somebody that kind of takes the next step.
What I’ve discovered is candidates will either just write the code, or they'll actually take the time to comment. It shows they want to take this further and be better than just average.
Another aspect of an interview that I pay a great deal of attention to is how many questions candidates ask me. The interviews should never just be one-way conversations, and the quality of questions you get back typically dictates the thought process that somebody has. And I've found throughout my career that the folks who are inquisitive from an interview perspective typically come across better at the end of the day.
We use HackerRank’s Developer Skills Platform to make sure we're getting folks in the door who are top-notch from the very beginning. From the core technology side of the fence, it's a broad technology team. From managing data centers, and core infrastructure, which is where you get into low-level TCP/IP stacks, and all sorts of firewall and network bandwidth issues, which is a very different kind of mindset than a developer has. Then up the stack, we have quite a large swath of Python developers, where we look for folks that are just top-notch. They're involved in data analytics, data transformation, ETL processes, down into the C sharp and dotnet world, and then deep into the JavaScript world as well.
What have you been able to achieve with HackerRank?
About a year ago, we began leveraging the HackerRank challenge test as the first step of our formal interview process. The questions and results are discussed in the first round of interviews—which makes the first round interview a lot more conversational because there's a topic. And so, it gives us a catalyst to have a good conversation. That’s important because it gets you both started on the right foot. And also ensures the time spent together is optimized as much as possible.
Then the results with the HackerRank challenge are reviewed at the end of the interview process to evaluate a candidate’s coding ability. So we like to use HackerRank as a bookend: it starts the process and ends the process.
Overall, HackerRank has helped us streamline our recruiting process significantly. In fact, in the time that I have been here, I have seen HackerRank actually up-level the quality of candidates that we are bringing in the door. So as we go forward, and we expect to hire a good deal more developers, I see it continuing to grow in importance and being a real linchpin of the process that we have.
Cloud Computing Expert Kesha Williams on Hiring, Mentoring, & Creating Community in Tech
Aug 11, 2020
Kesha Williams is an award-winning software engineer, machine learning practitioner, and AWS training architect at A Cloud Guru. An Amazon-recognized pioneer in machine learning and an expert Java developer, Kesha is a technical instructor in Java, cloud, DevOps, and machine learning. She’s taught and mentored thousands of developers across the world through her work, and through her social and professional networking platform, Colors of STEM.
She’s also a member of the HackerRank Skills Advisory Council, a panel of tech industry experts dedicated to defining an industry-standardized library of technical skills as a resource for those in tech.
HackerRank Senior Director of Product Management, Dan Somrack, connected with Kesha remotely to learn more about her journey from Java developer, to engineering manager, to cloud computing instructor. Along the way, we got Kesha’s advice on hiring cloud engineers—and her take on the importance of mentoring and community in tech.
Listen to the full interview below, or read on for our biggest takeaways.
A crash course in key cloud computing skills: what they are, and how to find folks that have them
While the notion of cloud computing has existed since the 1960s, cloud computing as we know it today is a much more recent advancement. Popular cloud computing providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, only emerged in 2006.
Since then, it’s revolutionized the world of tech. “When you’re using cloud computing, you as a developer, or as an organization—you’re no longer responsible for maintaining the hardware,” Kesha explains. “You actually leave that to the cloud providers.” It allows companies to ship products to market faster, and cheaper.
But hiring cloud engineers to build and maintain those cloud environments can be tricky. “Some of the requirements are different from your average software engineering job,” Kesha says.
The key skills of a cloud engineer skill set
When it comes to seeking out cloud engineer candidates, she says the key is to look for someone that understands both cloud architecture and development.
“You can’t just be great at architecture, and you can’t just be great at development. You have to blend those two skills into this cloud engineering role,” Kesha explains. When evaluating a cloud engineer, you need to ensure they have a balance of both skills.
"I've worked with architects that really understand the theory of how cloud services work...but practically, when it comes to implementation, things don't always fit together as neatly as you expect them to,” Kesha recalls. "On the flip side, I've seen very skilled developers...but they don't really understand the pros and cons of the different cloud services, and how they fit together." The key is to find candidates who can comfortably and practically exercise both skill sets.
Kesha’s advice for identifying strong cloud engineer candidates
But cloud engineer skills aren’t necessarily easy to assess in a simple 1:1 phone call. To begin narrowing down top candidates, she says, you can start with looking for certifications. But they’re not the be all and the end all to finding the right candidate.
“If they have the certification, and the job experience, and they’ve mastered one of the cloud providers—like Amazon Web Services (AWS)—it’s a good base,” Kesha says. For AWS, some of the certifications she looks for are the AWS Solutions Architect certification, and The Cloud Practitioner certification for candidates newer to the field.
“Make sure that they understand the different compute services, the storage services, the security services, and networking, and how they all fit together,” Kesha says. Looking at their side projects, too, can help garner a more complete understanding of their experience. As they’re evaluating candidates, she says, hiring managers can also use the HackerRank Skills Directory as a guide to leveling candidates. It defines a wide variety of key cloud computing skills, along with key competencies expected at the basic, intermediate, and advanced levels for each.
Upleveling cloud computing skills as a developer
And for developers looking to uplevel their skills in cloud computing, or prepare for a cloud engineer interview? Kesha says the Skills Directory can help them level themselves and determine areas to skill up. “For developers, it helps identify the areas that you need to know, or maybe areas where you’re strong, and areas where you’re weak and may need to skill up before an interview,” Kesha explains.
“Think of it like a learning path, really, with an outline to follow” Kesha says. “It shows you, for the basic competency [in a skill], these are the things that you need to know, or for intermediate, or for advanced.”
For those getting started in cloud, Kesha suggests starting with a foundational skill. “Always have a foundational skill that can apply to the cloud, but that you can fall back on,” Kesha explains. “For me, that foundational skill is Java.” From there, you build layers of expertise. “Once you have that foundational skill, then master one of the cloud service providers like AWS. And then, once you’ve mastered their basic services, pick a specialty,” she suggests. Whether it’s the internet of things (IoT), machine learning, or cybersecurity, taking this layered approach will help build up your experience. “It just really helps you stay marketable,” Kesha says.
The role of mentoring in tech: tips for getting started & creating community
In addition to being a cloud instructor and speaker, Kesha also dedicates much of her time to mentoring. She’s a mentor at Technovation, the New York Academy of Sciences, and her own organization, Colors of STEM. In a lot of ways, her motivation to mentor others stems from her own history in tech.
Getting started in mentoring
“When I was coming up in tech, I didn't really have a lot of female role models, or role models that looked like me. And being in the industry for 25 years—over those years, there were actually several times where I considered leaving tech because of how alone and isolated I felt,” Kesha explains. “And I just didn't want others to feel that way, and so I wanted to be for others what I never had.”
For those that want to get started in mentoring, Kesha suggests using a framework with mentees that helps relate the tech back to day-to-day problems. “I try to show them how it can apply to real life. That’s the first step,” she says. “And then I try to demystify the technology, and just show them that it’s not as complicated as people make it out to be. And I do that through real world examples.” For example, in a cloud computing mentorship course she taught for Women Who Code, she highlighted a soda theft detection model and an emotion detection model she created at home with AWS DeepLens.
The importance of finding community in tech
Mentoring is just one way that Kesha helps others to build community in tech. To her, it’s been an influential force in her career. “There have been many times where I’m the only female, or I’m the only African American [in the room]. And what’s worked to keep me in IT was realizing that there’s nothing else I enjoy doing,” Kesha explains. “There’s nothing else I want to do with my life. And so I had to find other people that were just like me.” For Kesha, that came in the form of building community.
“I joined Women Who Code many years ago, and that, for me, was a saving grace,” Kesha recalls. “I would attend events, and I would just look around the room, and I would see people that were just like me. And having that community is really what kept me in IT.”
From 0 to 800+ Remote Interviews: Lessons from ServiceNow’s Two-Week Transition to Remote Hiring
Jul 10, 2020
To respond to COVID-19, ServiceNow had to take their entire hiring process online—which meant a transition to 100% remote interviews. In this interview, NancyDeLeon, Director of Global Talent Acquisition, explains how they managed it.
At its core, ServiceNow’s purpose is simple but impactful: “to make the world of work, work better for people.” By crafting digital workflows for IT, employees, and customer support, ServiceNow is known for streamlining complex workflows—and helping companies improve productivity in the process. It’s how they’ve been able to help drive widespread digital transformation at their 6,200+ global customers.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the meaning of “work” took on a new definition. As safety necessitated a shift to work-from-home, ServiceNow’s 75 global offices were suddenly emptied. While employees began to adapt to this new form of work, companies around the world began to freeze or slow hiring. Hiring at ServiceNow, however, continued at its original pace: 30% growth year over year.
To continue to fuel company growth, ServiceNow shifted to 100% remote interviews. To learn how they did it, HackerRank CEO and Co-founder, Vivek Ravisankar, connected with Nancy DeLeon, Director of Talent Acquisition at ServiceNow. In their remote interview, they talk through how Nancy and her team led the Americas engineering organization from 0 to 800+ remote technical interviews in a matter of weeks, and took their entire internship program online.
You can listen to Vivek and Nancy’s full interview on HackerRank Radio, or read through the highlights below.
Three lessons learned from a two-week transition to remote interviews
Like many companies, the onsite interview was a core component of ServiceNow’s technical hiring process. But that changed quickly once employees started working from home. “Changing from onsite to a remote interview environment—it may not seem like such a tough thing to accomplish,” Nancy says. “However, going to 100% virtual interviews in less than a week in a high volume environment... that's going to be quite challenging.”
Granting employees access to remote interviewing tools wasn’t nearly enough. It necessitated a complete revamp of their hiring approach. “We had the daunting task of training a global engineering team, our recruiting team, and our talent acquisition operations team in a very short period of time,” Nancy recalls. “And we said, you know what? With HackerRank and ServiceNow: challenge accepted. And the results were fantastic.”
Lesson #1: Focus on training and documentation first
Transitioning the entire engineering organization from onsites to remote interviews was no easy task. The entire hiring organization—from recruiting, to engineering, to operations—had to relearn how to facilitate and run technical interviews. To ease the learning curve, Nancy’s team started by distributing training for each stakeholder organization. But documentation was the main tool they used to keep hiring on track.
“So, internally, we created a knowledge base,” Nancy says. “This allowed us to have a reference point where our internal teams knew where to go, and how to get things scheduled.” Having a central point of reference, she says, was a core driver for helping the team transition. Interviewers’ comfort with this new process was key for facilitating a positive candidate experience.
“The interviewers were able to find the questions right away. They were able to implement the questions—and the best part was the whiteboarding aspect, which made it very easy,” she explains. “On the candidate side, they felt that they were able to really showcase and highlight their skillset.”
Lesson #2: Tap into the power of existing tools and partnerships
According to Nancy, it’s ServiceNow’s existing talent tech stack that helped them pivot quickly. By leveraging HackerRank their team was already familiar with, they were able to scale from 0 to 800+ remote interviews in just a few weeks. “We were able to successfully implement about 800+ CodePair* interviews—and that's not including the CodeScreen* test that we actually rolled out [beforehand],” Nancy explains.
While that shift was driven by her team’s planning and coordination, Nancy says it couldn’t be done without leveraging their existing tools and partnerships. “Part of this success was because of the strong partnership with HackerRank. The team helped us with a seamless process and that resulted in our team being able to meet the high demand for the remote interviews.”
To Nancy, that’s what made the transition for interviewers feasible. “They really felt the tool was very easy and comprehensive and with the job aids, it was very intuitive,” Nancy explains. “So on the interviewer side, it was very seamless.”
Lesson #3: Make room for candidate feedback at scale
Facilitating feedback on the new process was key to ensuring a smooth transition. That boiled down to gathering internal feedback from interviewers as well as candidates being interviewed. “We had to capture success metrics, and of course overall satisfaction,” Nancy says.
It’s those metrics around satisfaction and experience that helped Nancy’s team monitor candidate sentiment. By monitoring candidate sentiment, they were able to keep tabs on what was (and what wasn’t) working.
“When I was measuring candidate experience with HackerRank CodeScreen*, it was actually one of the surprise results that I got. I was actually expecting much more of a negative result since there wasn't a human being on the other side,” Nancy explains. “But in fact strangely enough, most candidates said, ‘I really feel it was unbiased.’” That early feedback gave her team confidence to double down on their process.
The new future of work: ServiceNow’s take on distributed work and the road to recovery
At this point, the future of work is, in a lot of ways, uncertain. And though hiring continues for ServiceNow, they’re still in the process of determining what work post-COVID will look like. Nancy thinks it’s unlikely that work will return to the pre-COVID “normal”—but she does think there will be more room for face-to-face interaction once recovery starts.
The post-COVID workplace: an opportunity for flexible working?
Like most workplaces, remote work has forced ServiceNow to shift to an entirely remote hiring process. And given its success, she thinks it may be around to stay.
“We are going to continue with remote interviewing. We've successfully proven that we can hire and work virtually while maintaining our productivity,” Nancy says. “So, I foresee that this is going to continue as an option for our candidates and our employees.”
But on the other hand, Nancy doesn’t feel physical meetings will disappear entirely. “I also recognize that we're social beings and we're naturally going to need to be physically connected in some way,” Nancy explains. “So, I also see that we are going to still have some onsite interviewing, and working physically in the office will also return. But I see that as possibly an option—versus mandated—as a future part of our workforce.”
For ServiceNow, she sees the flexibility between physical and remote interviews as a talent branding need, too. “To be competitive as a company, we're going to have to consider how we’re able to provide those types of options, and how we’re going to be enabled to do both.”
Advice for candidates on the hunt for work
As the world sets eyes on the road to recovery, Nancy has some words of advice for candidates that have unexpectedly re-entered the job market due to layoffs and furloughs. “My best advice for candidates who are looking for their next opportunity is, number one, please take care of yourself and your family,” Nancy says. “Losing a job is like losing a little piece of us—so we are all grieving. Take the time to re-center yourself.”
She advises taking a strategic approach to searching for a new role. And part of that strategy is about taking the job search in stride. “Don't sit in front of your computer eight hours or a full day looking for a job,” Nancy suggests. “Instead schedule that time. Send out your applications, and then for the rest of the day, do something for yourself. Invest in your development and think about the future you want to be in.”
*Disclaimer: This blog post contains messaging around the "CodePair" and "CodeScreen" features which are now called "Interview" within the HackerRank product as of 10/06/20.
Making Remote Work: How Bloomberg Adapted to Virtual Interviews
Apr 29, 2020
Seemingly overnight, remote work—and by extension, virtual interviews—have become the new normal. For those hiring, the transition forced interview processes to adapt to a remote format in a matter of weeks. For most, it’s been a hectic, challenging transformation (to say the least).
But luckily, the transition to virtual interviews was something that Bloomberg’s engineering organization had inadvertently prepared for. They’ve been refining their engineering hiring process for years, focusing on creating a standardized, consistent hiring process that maintains a static hiring bar for the entire organization. It’s a huge part of what helped them make the transition to virtual interviews in a matter of weeks.
Since 2014, Kristen Arena has been helping to shape Bloomberg’s hiring process across both campus and experienced hire recruiting. She currently leads a team in campus recruiting, and is the lead recruiter for their CTO office.
HackerRank CEO and Co-Founder Vivek Ravisankar sat down with Kristen to learn how Bloomberg managed to adapt to virtual interviews in the face of stay-at-home orders. You can listen to their full audio interview below, or keep reading for our key takeaways.
How Bloomberg’s existing interview framework helped ease the transition
Even before stay-at-home orders were implemented, Bloomberg’s team had relied on a standardized interview process to hire for its engineering team. And according to Kristen, it’s those standardizations that helped ease the transition to virtual interviews.
Kristen says that though the process has some nuances across different roles, the interview process for most Bloomberg engineering roles follows a similar format. It generally consists of a phone interview followed by a few rounds of in person technical and HR interviews, either in our office or on campus.
Leveraging their existing foundation
“We have a very solid foundation, and a structure in place,” Kristen explains. Bloomberg used that existing structure to translate it to an online process. “We were able to say: ‘Alright, how do we keep it intact? How do we do it remotely?’”
The goal was to take the existing interview process—from tech phone interview to in person HR interview—and replicate it in a virtual setting without sacrificing the personal touch of an in-person experience. Though the first step of the interview process was already conducted remotely, the other steps were traditionally conducted on-site. So they had to be translated to a remote experience.
On top of that, they also had to adapt their internal procedures to maintain the same evaluation process: from pre-interview briefs, to interviewer prep, to group debriefs.
Replicating the on-site interview process virtually
Bloomberg’s transformation to a virtual interview process happened over a matter of weeks. But despite the tight timeline, they spared no amount of effort in ensuring the new, virtual process was thorough and candidate-centric.
Adapting candidate prep and increasing recruiter touch points
One change that Bloomberg had to account for: bolstering candidate prep. “We have always prided ourselves on really making sure that our candidates feel comfortable with the interview process,” Kristen explains. It’s why they’d already invested so much in their robust library of candidate prep resources before the transition to remote work. “Our approach, given the situation, was to just adopt that same mentality, but heighten it.”
To go the extra mile to get candidates comfortable with this new format, the Bloomberg team implemented a few primary changes:
Adding a virtual interview prep call: Each candidate gets a personal call from a member of the recruiting team to walk through the logistics of the interview. They share the schedule, what to expect in each round, explanations of when they’ll be able to take breaks, how much time they’ll have between rounds, expected next steps, and more.
Testing the interview setup one-on-one: The team also helps candidates head off technical difficulties by testing conferencing and interview tools with the candidate ahead of time. “From a technology perspective, we want to make sure they’re ready to go—so testing out the conferencing tool that we use, making sure they’re comfortable with HackerRank, and that they’re aware of the diagram feature within HackerRank we use for design questions,” Kristen says.
Simulating the in-office experience: Even from afar, Kristen’s team also goes above and beyond to help candidates experience the day-to-day of working at Bloomberg. For example, in lieu of an office tour, they share videos of the office with content about their company culture. To go a step further, they even give candidates a peek into the product by offering regular demos. “If you're a candidate and you have an interview coming up, you can drop into a video conference at some point during the week for a demo,” Kristen says. “It’s a little snapshot of Bloomberg, and a demo of our product—just to learn a little bit more about us before your actual interview.”
Together, these new measures help put candidates at ease—and in turn, enable them to perform their best in the interview. “In the context of the remote interview, things can get really lost. So we want to make sure that they feel comfortable,” Kristen explains.
Rethinking interviewer prep and feedback
Changing to a virtual interview process also necessitated a change in internal prep—especially when it comes to interviewers. “Our goal is always to make sure that the candidate is comfortable and has a great experience. And that really comes directly from the interviewers,” Kristen notes. “When we transitioned to remote interviewing, we were well aware that this poses a whole new set of challenges for interviewers as well as candidates.”Luckily, their interviewers already had a strong base to build on, since all interviewers at Bloomberg go through a training process before interviewing candidates. “They’re trained on how to assess various competencies, how to ask technical questions, and how to ensure each candidate will be a culture add to Bloomberg,” Kristen explains.
The structure gave them a head start on transitioning to virtual interviews—but they still had to brace for the change. To prep, they helped interviewers replicate the on-site, off-site by focusing on a few key asks:
Conducting virtual pre-briefs: Before the interview happens, the recruitment team brings the interviewers together to discuss the day-of game plan, just like they would for an in-person interview. They discuss what each round will cover, who’s covering it, and answer any questions—for every single interview, both for campus and senior candidates. “We use that same mentality going throughout the interview. So, we’ll use our virtual conference room to jump in, to share feedback, and to go into the next round,” Kristen says.
Sharing virtual interview best practices: To help the interviewers adjust to this new medium, the recruitment team shares their own tips for virtual interviews. For example, they asks that they create a neutral environment without distractions, and do their best to replicate eye contact by looking at the camera when speaking. Without body language to pick up on, some candidates can be even more nervous than usual; she asks interviewers to go out of their way to make candidates comfortable so it doesn’t impact the interview.
Maintaining group debriefs: “We’re very consensus-driven,” Kristen says. “So when we debrief, we want to hear everyone’s feedback.” Just like they would for an in-person interview, the recruitment team invites anyone the candidate has met or spoken with to a group debrief. Having an open conversation—albeit from afar—ensures that nothing is lost in translation from interviewer notes or assessments.
On the future of (remote) work and hiring
The interviewing process may have changed, but according to Kristen, Bloomberg’s hiring plans haven’t changed. “We’re hiring as usual,” she reports. Their internships and work has gone 100% virtual for the time being, but hiring hasn’t slowed. “Candidates are still looking for roles, and we’re still looking for candidates. So we’ve just been trying our best to make sure that our process aligns with the current situation, and that candidates feel supported.”To Bloomberg’s recruitment team, that means adopting a candidate-centric approach: one where empathy dictates the interviewing process. “I think it's that relationship-building piece, and really letting the candidate guide the process: listen to them, listen to what their challenges are from a remote perspective, and be empathetic as well. I think that human aspect is critical,” Kristen says.
The flexible future of interviewing
Will we revert to old hiring processes and practices post-pandemic? Kristen is cautiously optimistic. “I do think that, hopefully, someday, we will return to in-person interviewing,” she says. “I think that will always be an element, because it’s valued and important.”
But on the flip side, she says, she could potentially see a world where candidates could have more options to choose virtual interviews—but nothing is set in stone yet.
For Bloomberg, the process changes forced by stay-at-home orders have inadvertently tested their adaptability, Kristen notes. “I think [these changes] just opened another door—another way of being able to recruit in a way that maybe we didn’t think was possible or useful before. But it is. And we’re doing it.”
Tips for Remote Hiring: How Atlassian is Making Virtual Interviews a Reality
Apr 03, 2020
Remote hiring is a process that companies across all sectors are now incorporating into their hiring strategy. To help set your team up for remote hiring success, HackerRank’s Co-founder and CEO, Vivek Ravisankar, spoke with Atlassian’s Andy Mountney about remote hiring best practices.
When it comes to remote interviewing, Atlassian is ahead of the curve—in fact, it’s something they’ve been doing since their founding. Originally started in Australia, Atlassian began hiring remotely as a means to bring international talent to work at their Sydney HQ. Pursuing international talent meant some candidates weren’t able to attend a traditional onsite—so remote interviews became a must-have. They’ve been refining and perfecting their remote hiring process ever since.
As the Talent Acquisition Site Lead for Atlassian’s Sydney location, Andy Mountney has been helping his technical teams conduct remote interviews since 2018. To hear his advice on creating a smooth remote hiring process, read the key takeaways below.
Define, document, and communicate a consistent remote hiring process
Changes in policies and procedures will inevitably happen when making the shift to remote hiring. To minimize room for dysfunction, Andy advises that teams spend time defining and documenting what the new remote hiring process will look like. Then communicate the process to internal team members and candidates.
Start by defining & documenting your process
Explicitly defining the new workflow prevents confusion and empowers interviewers to deliver a positive remote candidate experience. It also proactively answers questions from interviewers, and enables teams to adjust quickly if a teammate—or the entire company—suddenly has to work remotely.
“I think one of the real strengths we had when making this pivot wasn't just the fact that we've already conducted so many remote interviews. It was the documentation that we had to support it,” says Andy. “With it, we could lift very quickly at scale and build consistency into that change...so I’d certainly encourage people to document it and think about it.”
Communicate clearly, and often
What’s next after defining and documenting your new remote hiring process? Communicate it to your candidates. Many candidates have never gone through an entirely remote hiring process; it’s the recruiter’s responsibility to set expectations. Andy says it’s also crucial that recruiters communicate the intended outcome of the process, should there be a mutual fit.
“It's important to make sure that the candidate understands [if] there could be an offer coming out of this process still if it's successful,” says Andy. “You want your recruiters to be [asking]: Will you be ready if we make an offer? How can we help you make that decision?”
Especially when taking your hiring process remote, it’s helpful to amp up your candidate communications. Atlassian has done this by increasing the number of digital touch points they have with their candidates throughout the hiring process—just one of the ways they’ve adapted their in-person hiring process to a remote-friendly one.
Don’t skimp on candidate or interviewer prep
It’s natural to feel more relaxed when working from home. But it’s important for candidates to treat the remote interview the same way they would treat a traditional onsite. Andy encourages candidates to dedicate plenty of time to prepping; from his perspective, it’s the best way they can set themselves up for success.
Preparing to interview from home
“Typically, if you were going to an interview as a candidate, you're going to prepare for going to a physical place. And you're going to think about, perhaps, your journey there,” says Andy. “If you're interviewing remotely as a candidate, it’s still important to take that step and just think about the environment you’re going to deliver your interview in.”
At Atlassian, Andy says it’s standard to send candidates a guide with interview prep tips and suggestions. He likes to include things like:
Instruction on how to access the video interview tool they’ll be using, and any other tools or software they’ll need for the interview
A reminder to choose a clean and comfortable interview space
The names and LinkedIn profiles of the people on the interview panel
Adopt a 10-minute rule
Andy says it’s equally important that the interview panel prepares for each interview.
“From the interviewer's perspective, it's important to make sure that interviewers are set up to switch into that interview mindset—just as they would be in the workplace.”
To enable that, Atlassian likes to set aside an extra 10 minutes before the interview for both the interviewer and the candidate to get ready. During these 10 minutes, the interviewer and the candidates have the time to set up, calm any nerves, and get ready for their discussion.
“We block that time out in the interviewer’s calendar so that they have that 10 minutes to get their brain into the right place to deliver the interview, get their laptops set up, and get their tools set up for the interview,” Andy explains. “I think that really helps calm someone down and get them back into that right place to deliver.”
When in doubt, practice empathy
For most candidates, remote interviewing is a new experience. And to make that transition smooth, empathy is a must-have. “I think for remote interviews, it’s just about thinking ‘How can I help facilitate something which is possibly a first-time experience for the person on the other end?,’” Andy stressed. And that starts with the interviewer.
Focus on putting the candidate at ease
“As an interviewer, you have as much responsibility as the candidate does to make it a great experience,” Andy says. To accurately evaluate fit, it’s key that interviewers give candidates a welcoming, comfortable atmosphere to showcase their skills.
“For the interviewer, [it’s important] to make the interviewing experience as comfortable as possible, and to ensure that the [candidate] is only being evaluated on the skills and attributes that they should be.” That means keeping focus on the candidate’s skills—not their video background, or accidental interruptions from their family.
Evaluate on skills, not minor mishaps
Say, for example, the candidate is having trouble with their video tool in the first 5-10 minutes of the interview. While some interviewers might see this as a red flag, Andy stresses that this isn’t a chance to judge the candidate. Instead, he feels strongly that interviewers should keep the evaluation to the interview itself.
“[It’s a] big responsibility of the interviewer to help calm that person, settle them, and help them reset [in the event of an issue],” Andy argues. “It’s not an opportunity to judge.” A little bit of empathy for the candidate can go a long way, and can help you stay focused on what matters: their skills.
Use the flexibility of remote hiring to your advantage
Since remote interviewing can be done from home—versus an office—it’s inherently more flexible. Andy sees that as an opportunity to build an even stronger relationship with the candidate.
“I think one of the advantages of the remote [interview] is that you can build in breaks very comfortably...whether it’s hard stops over the course of 24 hours, or a longer period of time,” Andy notes. With remote hiring, companies have the chance to break the interview process up into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Take, for example, breaks between interviews. “Typically, [you’d be] trying to fill that space if somebody was onsite,” Andy explains. To keep the candidate engaged, you might have to orchestrate activities like office tours, team lunches, or coffee breaks.
But by cutting them out, you give candidates more room to reset, or prepare for their next round. “Now, you’re actually giving that time back to candidates.” And that helps candidates get in the right headspace to deliver a great interview.
The future of remote hiring at Atlassian
So how will this shift to remote hiring impact Atlassian’s hiring process in the long run? “We always want to learn through experience—and inevitably, we’re going to learn through this experience.” Andy believes. “We’re really fascinated to see the impact of a remote-only interviewing model.”
Atlassian regularly surveys candidates on their interview experience: the highs, the lows, and everything in between. They plan to keep a close eye on that data to learn from this transition as it unfolds.
“Will it enhance or deliver specific changes that we’ve identified today? Absolutely not,” Andy admits. “But when we get back in the office, it’ll be a good opportunity to retro, reflect, and understand what the opportunities are: what we could’ve done better, and what [the process] will look like going forward.”
Want to listen to the conversation live? Catch Vivek and Andy’s interview on HackerRank Radio
Beyond Technical Acumen: Kaggle’s CEO on the Key Elements of a Data Scientist Skill Set
Nov 27, 2019
What are the core components of a strong data scientist skill set? And how should you evaluate a data scientist candidate once you find them? HackerRank CEO and Co-founder, Vivek Ravisankar, sat down with Kaggle CEO and Co-founder, Anthony Goldbloom to explore the ins and outs of this growing role.
With over 3.8MM users, Kaggle is the world’s largest data science and machine learning community. It’s home to 25,000+ public datasets, nearly 300,000 public notebooks, and a library of data science micro-courses. Through their data science competitions, they encourage their community to tackle real-world machine learning problems across industries.
As CEO and Co-founder of Kaggle, and as a data scientist himself, Anthony Goldbloom is one of the foremost experts on the exploding field of data science.
Its rapid rise to popularity has led to confusion amongst hiring teams. What skills does a data scientist have? What do they work on? And what’s the difference between data scientists and machine learning engineers?
To understand through the eyes of an expert, we sat down with Anthony to learn how data science as we know it came to be—and what skill set defines a “data scientist” today. Here’s what we learned:
2012 and 2018 were defining years for the field
According to Anthony, 2012 was an annus mirabilis (or, a “miracle year”) for deep learning. With the introduction of neural networks, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) took off. That lead to a landslide of advances in natural language processing, speech, and computer vision. It’s why we’ve seen such a boom in applications of computer vision across cases like self-driving vehicles, radiology and security cameras.
Thanks in part to those advances, neural networks and gradient-boosting now play a major part in defining the day-to-day of a data scientist. “Those are the two things I think data scientists today are spending most of their time on,” Anthony said.
Hear the extended audio interview on our podcast, HackerRank Radio:
But advances in 2018 may change that focus moving forward, according to Anthony. “You could argue that 2018 was the annus mirabilis for natural language processing.” With new advances in natural language process, we’re bound to see an increase in use cases.
“Just as autonomous cars, and radiology, and some security use cases have been unlocked by computer vision—what sort of use cases might we see around natural language processing?” Though only time will tell, teams may see those use cases impact hiring needs moving forward.
The role "data scientist" has many meanings
Within data science, there are a number of distinct roles, from data analysts, to data engineers, data scientists, and more. But the difference between them isn’t always clear amongst employers. “I’m not surprised that companies are confused—because it is fairly confusing.”
When it comes to distinguishing data scientists from data analysts, Anthony’s criteria is simple. “I classify a data scientist as someone who writes code in order to produce inputs.” A data analyst or business analyst, on the other hand, leans primarily on tools like Tableau or Excel. A data scientist’s role can also span a wider set of responsibilities. “[A data scientist] could be doing anything from writing pivot tables all the way through to training machine learning models.”
But even the term “data scientist” has its own set of nuances. To Anthony, “data scientist” is an umbrella term that can be used to describe a variety skill sets and focal areas. In his eyes, there are 2 primary subcategories: type I data scientists, and type II data scientists.
Type I data scientists
Type I data scientists focus on building algorithms that will go into production. The algorithms that power Facebook's newsfeed and Netflix's content recommendations are good examples.
As a part of their work, most type I data scientists spend their days training a machine learning algorithm (often, either a neural network or a gradient-boosting machine). This is the category where Anthony places Machine Learning Engineers and AI Engineers.
Type II data scientists
The work of type II data scientists, on the other hand, generally isn’t destined for production. Instead, this type of data science focuses on deriving and analyzing insights that a business can ultimately productionize. “It’s insights that you can productionize,” Anthony says.
A type II data science may use similar tools to a type data scientist, like machine learning algorithms. But they may also be working on something as simple as a pivot table.
A strong data scientist skill set isn't just about technical know-how
No matter the subtype of data scientist, one thing is clear: technical acumen alone doesn’t an effective data scientist. Instead, a well-rounded data scientist has a combination of both hard and soft skills, including (but not limited to) technical skills, business acumen, creativity, and communication. So hiring teams need to look for much more than technical expertise.
Underlining the importance of business savvy
Anthony has seen this firsthand through competitions on Kaggle. “People will build an amazing algorithm on [a] problem,” Anthony explained. “But if the evaluation metric is wrong, or the target variable isn’t a variable that’s useful to predict, then the algorithm is completely useless.”
Understanding the algorithm’s ultimate application is the difference between a functional, but ineffective algorithm, and one that solves a real problem. Even the most technically sound algorithm—if designed to produce a meaningless output—won’t yield a desirable result. “Building an effective algorithm requires you to be strong technically, but it also requires you to have good business context.”
To produce good work, a great data scientist needs to know how their work adds value to the company, and ultimately, how it will be used.
How Anthony's team evaluates Kaggle profiles (hint: it's not about competition scores)
So, how does Anthony’s team find data scientists with this unique skill set? For starters, they turn to Kaggle. “Our community’s actually a very good signal.”
But reading a Kaggle profile isn’t as intuitive as you might think. “We grade people on 3 criteria: their competition performance, the kernels [and notebooks] they share—how many upvotes they get—and their contribution to discussion [in the forums].” Typically, a candidate that’s done well in any 1 of those 3 areas will get an interview.
That said, it doesn’t mean that all criteria are created equal. “Of the 3 criteria...I care about most about discussion,” Anthony said. Why? Because it’s an indicator of both technical and soft skills. “You only get upvotes if you are technically insightful and you’re a clear communicator.” But in competitions, for example, you can be technically strong with poor communication skills—and a strong data scientist skill set requires both.
Where the most successful data scientists come from
Data science is still a burgeoning field—so candidates that come to data science from diverse backgrounds are something of a norm. With the right mix of technical expertise, curiosity, storytelling, and cleverness, people from virtually any field can become a data scientist.
In fact, an analysis on graduates of the Insight Data Science Fellows Program—a training fellowship designed to help PhD graduates transition into data science—showed that successful fellows stemmed from fields ranging from Physics to Neuroscience to the Social Sciences.
Of roughly 700 Insight Data Science fellows analyzed, graduates came from a variety of academic backgrounds ranging from Physics to Social Sciences (via Scott Crole)
Given the variety of backgrounds they come from, resumes and verbal interviews aren’t always the most effective way to evaluate the skills data scientists have to offer. When it comes to hiring, Anthony has had the most success evaluating data scientists through miniature projects.
“[We’d] give them a project that we cared about, or that would look like a project they’d tackle internally,” he said. For Anthony, it gives a more nuanced look into their skill set as a data scientist. “We learned more from that than anything else, frankly.”
The project-based approach didn’t just spotlight their technical skills. By asking candidates why they made the decisions they did, it also gave the panel an opportunity to explore soft skills like business savvy, storytelling, and communication. “And I think there’s probably just about no substitute for that—because a good data scientist can come from a very wide variety of backgrounds.”
Evaluating data scientist skill sets
Data science is an evolving field—and like any new field, it’s going to align on the nomenclature, the use cases, and the skill sets that define it. But by diving into the history of the field—and the way it’s applied today—you can better understand how to hire them.
Hiring data scientists at your organization? Read more about HackerRank Projects for Data Science, or read what we learned about data science hiring from our survey of 70,000+ developers and technical professionals:
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To respond to COVID-19, ServiceNow had to take their entire hiring process online—which meant a transition to 100% remote interviews. In this interview, NancyDeLeon, Director of Global Talent Acquisition, explains how they managed it. 
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For ServiceNow, she sees the flexibility between physical and remote interviews as a talent branding need, too. “To be competitive as a company, we're going to have to consider how we’re able to provide those types of options, and how we’re going to be enabled to do both.”
Seemingly overnight, remote work—and by extension, virtual interviews—have become the new normal. For those hiring, the transition forced interview processes to adapt to 
To go the extra mile to get candidates comfortable with this new format, the Bloomberg team implemented a few primary changes:
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To Bloomberg’s recruitment team, that means adopting a 
