In the realm of technology and recruitment, Ernst & Young (EY) stands as a beacon of innovation, pioneering strategies that address the ever-evolving challenges of tech hiring. EY is one of the world’s largest professional services networks and has over 350,000 employees! With employee strength as strong as this, EY faces unique challenges in terms of finding skilled talent, dealing with thousands of candidates for each open role, and more!

In a recent conversation with EY, we uncovered profound insights shared by two distinguished figures from EY, unveiling their approach to shaping the future of talent acquisition in the technology sector. 

We spoke with Tanu Garg, Executive Director at EY, who brings over 14 years of experience in risk and regulatory reporting across major banks and financial institutions. Her expertise spans both US and UK regulatory frameworks, with pivotal roles at Barclays and Genpact before her tenure at EY.

Joining her was Thiru Vengadam, Partner at EY and a vanguard in the tech and digital arena. Thiru’s impressive career includes significant tenures at Citigroup and Bank of America, where he was instrumental in driving digital transformations.

Optimizing Tech Hiring

The discussion centered on EY’s pioneering techniques in tech hiring, exploring the challenges of aligning talent with rapidly evolving technological demands, and the strategies EY employs to navigate these complexities effectively. This theme is particularly relevant as companies grapple with the dual challenge of meeting immediate project demands while also building a resilient and adaptable tech workforce for the future.

EY’s approach to this challenge is multifaceted, blending traditional recruitment strategies with innovative practices that recognize the unique demands of the tech sector. 

Navigating Demand Fulfillment Complexities

At the heart of EY’s recruitment strategy lies the challenge of aligning talent with the dynamic demands of technology. With a global team of over 75,000 technology professionals, EY’s growth in the tech space necessitates a nuanced approach to recruitment, balancing traditional consulting specialization with a burgeoning startup culture. This method ensures recruitment of individuals who are not just skilled but also adaptable to technological advancements.

Innovative Recruitment: The Hack to Hire Model

EY’s “Hack to Hire” model exemplifies their innovative approach to recruitment. By leveraging hackathons and similar competitions, EY identifies candidates who not only possess technical expertise but also exhibit creative problem-solving skills, ensuring a dynamic and effective match between candidates’ capabilities and project needs.

HackerRank’s platform enables EY to conduct these competitions at scale, offering a dynamic and engaging way to assess candidates’ real-world capabilities.

The Importance of Skillset Diversity

Skillset diversity is paramount in tech hiring, given the vast and varied field of technology. EY’s approach to mapping specific skills required for each project underscores the importance of understanding and addressing the diverse skill sets needed for successful recruitment and project implementation.

The HackerRank Effect

In the tech industry, where skillset diversity is crucial, HackerRank plays a pivotal role in EY’s recruitment strategy. The platform’s extensive skills directory and tailored assessments allow EY to map and evaluate the specific skills required for various tech roles. This capability is key to addressing the wide range of digital skills needed in today’s tech landscape, from data analytics to digital transformation initiatives, ensuring that EY’s talent pool is both diverse and proficient.

The implementation of HackerRank within EY’s recruitment process has yielded tangible benefits. HackerRank assessments were instrumental in processing and evaluating a vast influx of referrals, streamlining the selection process, and significantly reducing the time-to-hire. Moreover, HackerRank’s role in internal assessments and skill validations has been crucial for EY’s upskilling and reskilling initiatives, ensuring that the workforce remains at the cutting edge of technological advancements.

Personalizing the Recruitment Process

EY’s recruitment process is characterized by its personalized nature. Utilizing technology, EY tailors the recruitment experience to align with the strengths and aspirations of individual developers. This tailored approach ensures a mutually beneficial relationship between the candidate and the company, fostering a conducive environment for growth and innovation.

By leveraging HackerRank, EY can tailor the recruitment experience to individual candidates, aligning assessments and challenges with the candidates’ unique skills and career aspirations. This personalized approach not only enhances the candidate experience but also ensures a better fit between the new hires and EY’s project needs, fostering a productive and satisfying work environment.

Conclusion

EY’s insights into tech hiring illuminate the path forward for talent acquisition in the technology sector. By embracing agility, diversity, and personalization in their recruitment strategies, EY not only addresses the immediate needs of their projects but also sets the stage for the future of the tech industry. As the landscape of tech hiring continues to evolve, EY’s pioneering approaches offer valuable lessons for organizations striving to navigate the complexities of recruiting in the digital age, shaping a future where talent and technology converge to drive innovation and success.

To know more about EY’s strategic approaches to acing tech hiring, visit here.

The post Optimizing for Excellence: EY’s Modern Approaches to Streamlining Hiring Processes appeared first on HackerRank Blog.

We were recently joined by Zerodha’s CEO & Co-Founder Nithin Kamath and CTO Kailash Nadh for a candid conversation about growing a tech company.

Read on for a few of our favorite insights from the talk, or watch the full livestream below:

Know How To Sell

“I think the most important skill a business person should have is knowing how to sell.”

Nithin Kamath began the conversation by highlighting the importance of sales experience in entrepreneurship. 

Dedicate Time to Creative Pursuits

“Though it seems out of left field, taking on creative pursuits like learning how to play an instrument or making pottery or even playing a sport can help you run a business.”

Kamath discussed creative pursuits and how they can help entrepreneurs develop the business skills needed to run a tech company.

Pick a Specialization

“You also need to pick a specialization. You need to find something that you love and venture deep into it. For me, that’s the market.”

Entrepreneurs may have a variety of interests, but Nithin Kamath declared that entrepreneurs should pick a key business area to specialize in.

Be Adaptable

“Markets are all about uncertainty and volatility so it’s in our DNA as a company to be vigilant and nimble.”

Markets are constantly changing and companies need to consistently adapt to remain competitive, so Kailash Nadh proclaimed the need for businesses to be adaptable.

Make the Right Business Decisions

“Even if you have the most talented developers or the most sophisticated infrastructure, an executive-level team that doesn’t have deep expertise in tech being in charge of tech decisions means the business might just collapse.”

Nadh explained that having the best tech and developers alone doesn’t guarantee success, and experienced executives need to make the right decisions to ensure their company is successful.

Deconstruct Every Idea

“All of us in the tech team get excited by many features that other companies are implementing but we objectively deconstruct every product idea, business idea and feature idea, by involving everyone in the company and deciding, based on objective questions, whether it’s worth doing.”

It’s easy for product teams to be influenced by what other companies are doing, but Kailash Nadh detailed Zerodha’s process of deconstructing every feature idea before deciding what to develop.

Prioritize Accessibility

“We want to make our app as user-friendly as possible to as many people as possible, so that naturally means that accessibility is a key part of our product philosophy.”

User-friendly apps have higher adoption rates and accessible apps are more user-friendly, so Nadh affirmed the business value of prioritizing accessibility in product development.

The post Key Insights From Our Conversation With Zerodha’s CEO and CTO: How to Grow a Tech Company appeared first on HackerRank Blog.

Making millions through fantasy sports may sound like a pipe dream, but one Indian company is working to make this dream a reality.

Dream11 is a gaming app that revolves around building fantasy sports teams and battling it out with friends and strangers in a virtual playing field. The app hosts an array of sports – cricket, football, hockey and more – and has caught the attention of millions of users all over the country.

HackerRank’s Senior Director of Marketing, Aadil Bandukwala, recently sat down with Dream11’s CTO Amit Sharma to talk about the dream teams, tools and technologies behind the popular app – watch the full conversation below, or read on for takeaways.

Key Takeaways

• Performance is the DNA of Dream11’s engineering teams
• Personalization and enhancing social gaming are key areas of focus for the company in 2022.
• The tech team is divided into four pods, or “dream teams.”
• Dream11 is big on homegrown solutions.

The theme of the year is personalization

Personalisation has been a key driver of success in businesses for many years now – Coca Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, Snapchat’s Bitmoji and Grammarly’s weekly personalized reports have all been incredibly successful initiatives. 

At Dream11, Amit said they’re focusing on this in 2022. “We’ve dabbled with personalization. For example, a couple of years ago, we introduced a “For You” page on our app where users are recommended contests based on previous ones they participated in. It’s enjoyed a lot of success so far; 85% of user interaction with contests actually begins in this section.” 

“This year, we want to optimize for personalization everywhere in the app – from the homepage to the payments screen.”

“Another key area of focus for us this year is integrating our social and gameplay aspects. The app contains groups, connected networks, and chat options but we’re going beyond providing these basic social features. We’re going to provide users abilities like joining contests from a group and reading friends’ scores to make the app more engaging.”

Social gaming saw a meteoric rise during the pandemic, and is predicted to make a long lasting impact on the gaming industry. At the fringes of social gaming lie metaverses, blockchain, NFTs and the play-to-earn business model which are all piquing the curiosity of business leaders around the world today.

The “Dream Teams” – and Their Tools  

Big goals necessitate a competent and organized team equipped with the right tools to achieve them.

“Our entire team is divided into four pods, or dream teams,” said Sharma. “Each team is responsible for a certain area – there is one for gameplay, there’s one for social, there’s one for gamification.”

What are the tools and technologies that these dream teams are equipped with to create? “We do some standardization when it comes to our programming languages and frameworks – more than 90% of our services are written on vert.x.” said Sharma, “Because we’re a lean team of 350 engineers, standardization helps. Some of the “behind the scenes” services I talked about earlier use Cassandra, some use Ignite, some use MySQL and Aurora, and some use Aerospike, and elasticache is the caching layer for it.” 

He talked about the journey they made from a monolithic architecture (where all software is unified and sits in one place) to a microservice-based one – “A few years ago, we realized that we need to develop deep expertise in distributed systems and create a complete micro services architecture instead of the monolithic one we had in order to serve millions of users concurrently.”

Amit expanded on the services, “When you open the app, the homepage that loads is powered by a service, we have a “contest” service that lists all the contests associated with the user’s account, we have a “leaderboard” service and behind the scenes, we have automated services like authentication that complete the user flow. Each of these services are individually and carefully designed.”

Alongside attention to detail and creative flexibility through industry-first technologies, Sharma said that performance is the DNA of the engineering team. The performance testing framework they use is “Torque”, a homegrown solution made up of Jenkins, Scala, Spark and more.

In-house vs. Outsource

Being made in-house, Torque is not an outlier in Dream11’s tech stack – in fact, they have many homegrown solutions that they’ve built from the ground-up. 

Sharma recalled when they decided to focus on building solutions in-house rather than look for suitable third party solutions. “Every startup goes through a journey. In the beginning, you don’t have the in-house expertise to build solutions yourself, so you just pick anything off the shelf that you can afford and fit it into your stack,” said Sharma.”It becomes different when you start to scale. Our scale is one of the highest in the country right now. When we leveraged third-party vendors and solutions, we observed many bottlenecks.”

It’s a common problem that isn’t talked about enough – Third party solutions that serve hundreds and hundreds of customers tend to have a common set of features that they offer everybody or groups of customers. “If there’s a use-case or need that’s very specific to you, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll incorporate it in their product or service unless you’re a huge and influential brand,” said Sharma.

Developing solutions in-house comes with its own set of challenges, too. For example, this approach begets higher costs including training if your employees don’t have the requisite skills. For the last couple of years, outsourcing has enjoyed the spotlight as freelance workers grow in numbers and more businesses embrace the gig economy. According to Upwork, 50 percent of freelancers provide highly skilled services such as computer programming, IT, and business consulting. 

DataAware is Dream11’s data solution built from scratch; it’s a funnel analytics tool they use to analyze and understand user behavior. “In today’s world, a data lake with a simple SQL interface is not enough,” said Sharma. “We’re also a data-driven company; one of our company values is data obsession so it makes sense that we built our own data platform.”

They’ve also built a customized machine learning model. “The data science team is able to accurately predict the traffic expected using our homegrown ML model,” said Sharma. 

The post How Dream11’s Technology Powers India’s Fantasy Sports Frenzy appeared first on HackerRank Blog.

“The traditional finance industry and the crypto industry will work hand in 
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“The next big technology company will emerge from the blockchain industry.” 

“There will be two spaces that people will live in — the physical space and 
the digital space. Already, retail stores, corporate offices, and video games 
have established their presence in the metaverse.”

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