Facebook VP and Google director is now COO of India’s HackerRank

The trend of Indian startups hiring high profile executives to help them scale up and compete with global rivals continues. The latest recruit is a Harvard MBA who was vice-president of global sales at Facebook for over six years and sales director for Google for nearly four years before that. Grady Burnett, who was also COO of app analytics company Flurry, began his professional life as a tennis player on the ATP circuit, but is now among the top players in tech.

Fittingly enough, it’s the technical talent site HackerRank, which ranks programmers on their coding skills, that has hired Burnett as president and COO. “As we continue to help make the world flat by ranking programmers purely based on skill, it was crucial for us to bring on Grady, an expert in global sales and operations, to accelerate our growth worldwide,” says Vivek Ravisankar, CEO and co-founder of HackerRank.

This follows the recent hiring of Ahmed Aly, a former software engineer at Google renowned as a competitive coding champion. He now leads HackerRank’s hackathons, named CodeSprints.

The new ways of tech hiring

Grady explains the gap that HackerRank fills by its recruitment model based on coding challenges:

Having built high performing teams of thousands of people at Facebook, Google, DoubleClick, and Flurry, I’ve personally seen the holes in the traditional hiring process. In the past, we used blunt credentials, like GPA or school, to filter through high volume of candidates. But these filters consistently leave out diamonds in the rough.

He goes on to point out the big difference this is making to candidates and recruiters alike. “Because HackerRank ranks programmers by coding skills, we democratize hiring and create opportunities for people from all walks of life. Customers such as VMware and Zenefits that report saving more than 70 percent of hiring costs are a testament to the innovation HackerRank is bringing to tech recruiting,” he adds.

HackerRank is not alone in doing this, however. In India, the similarly named HackerEarth is a competitor. And Venturesity has made a specialty of hiring by hackathon. It lets companies post “challenges” mimicking real working scenarios, instead of boring job descriptions. Jobseekers form teams – either on their own or on the Venturesity community forum – to tackle the challenges. These hackathons enable employers to look beyond resumes and interviews to candidates’ product development capabilities and team dynamics. “In most hackathons, it is the team that gets hired. It is like a 48-hour-old startup getting acqui-hired,” Subhendu Panigrahi, founder and CEO of Venturesity, told Tech in Asia in a recent interview.

HackerRank was founded by software engineers Vivek Ravisankar and Harishankaran Karunanidhi in 2012. A Y Combinator grad, the startup raised US$7.5 million in a series B round of funding from Recruit Holding’s HR Technology Fund in July 2015. It has raised nearly US$20 million in all so far, making it one of the best funded in the tech recruitment space. It can afford to hire top global talent for itself.

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