Hiring tech talent? This Indian startup bags $7.5M to assess programmers on your behalf

Indian technical recruitment site HackerRank today announced that it received US$7.5 million in strategic investment from Japanese company Recruit Holdings through its HR Technology Fund. The company raised US$9.2 million from Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures last year.

HackerRank, a Y Combinator graduate, is used by programmers to hone their coding skills and by companies to recruit tech talent. HR Technology Fund president Chihiro Ueda says HackerRank “offers an efficient way for HR professionals to evaluate talent beyond traditional means.”

Companies buy a recruiter license and use it to test candidates on the site. The license allows them to test 100 candidates. “We want to ensure that tech hiring is based on a meritocracy,” said Vivek Ravisankar, CEO and co-founder of HackerRank.

The three-year-old startup claims to have one million developers and 1,000 companies, including Adobe, Amazon, Walmart, Bloomberg, and JPMorgan Chase, recruiting from the site. The fresh funds will be used to increase user adoption.

The startup has also developed DroidRank for recruitment of Android developers, but with today’s funding it intends to expand image processing, system administration, security engineering, and big data recruitment.

According to a recent survey, 88 percent of organizations with more than 1,000 employees can’t find the tech hires needed to power innovation. Given this huge unmet potential, tech hiring is ripe for innovation.

In India, HackerRank competes with AngelPrime-backed HackerEarth. It is also up against UK-based Codelity which offers automated assessment tests and professional assessment services for recruiting software developers.