Hire Top Linux Talent and System Admins with SudoRank [Webinar]

all right thank you so much for joining my name is Tom nickel I'm in product marketing here at hack rank I'm here by my colleague from Solutions engineering Chris bror and we're going to talk to you about a pseudo rank we're going to show you how you can use studo rank to Source screen interview and hire the Linux T Talent mention my name is Tom nich in product marketing I'm going to talk about some of the great industry challenges with tech recruting and I'm going to talk a little about hacker ring for work solve some of those challenges and then we talk a little bit more about some very specific um Tech roles with managing your data center after that uh my colleague Chris uh a solution engineer he's going to take over and talk to you a little bit about pseudo rank give you technical specs give you a live walkthrough and demonstration and I wrap up and Q&A session afterwards so for joining looking to a great webinar so let's in um as you'll me as you'll notice throughout this presentation I actually like to mix in quotes uh that aren't necessarily haering but that app to the industry one I read pretty recently it's by L Wy the New Yorker and she said the world is being rebuilt in code hiring computer Engineers used to be the province of tech companies but these days every business from Nation to finance is a tech company and for those of you on the phone who are in Tech recruiting I think resonates pretty strongly with you as as well as it does with us and it's true um and I've got some examples to show that you know really doesn't matter what your business does anymore everyone needs strong Tech Talent really great examples of that how otherwise bigger uh Market leaders are being slightly disrupted by this shift um one is with Airbnb um so Airbnb um B forced Market leaders like Hilton to really upgrade their technology sta Airbnb came along with SAS website a great app really challenged Hilton's market share uh in like the hotel room rental space and H had to really play a lot of catch up to get their website and their mobile app up to Snuff another really cool example that I use for uh technology is actually the Walt Disney Company usually when we think about the Walt Disney Company we think about Disneyland or Disney World and we think about theme parks and movies like Snow White and Cinderella Disney actually spending a tremendous amount of time in money $1 billion dollar with a B in fact on the magic plus initiative uh this is is what basically got rolled out at Walt Disney rolled in Florida where um customers at their Parks get the magic bands which are RFID bands that kind of track what you do and get you access to your hotel rooms and rise and Fastpass and things like that and the my magic Plus app is their mobile app solution on top of that they've actually implemented free Wi-Fi for all of their parks in Disney World in Florida as well you know why would Disney spend a billion dollars on things like that obviously because they feel like even though this technology was expensive it's going to pay dividends it's ultimately going to revenue in the future by having their customers spend more so other cool examples of how technology is also helping shift um business Walmart's another good example they're seeing their sales grow quite a bit through their mob Calgary is just one example of cities all across the globe that are building their own mobile apps and mobile websites and Honest Company by Jessica ala it's on track to be a billion dooll company and a lot of that a huge part of that is through what they've done via social media their webs app so these are five really awesome examples of how technology is how companies used to think about their business technology is now a part of every business no matter what you do or how technical or non-technical your products May so this is news everyone needs techn and Tech Talent um but to some degree it's also bad news and the reason it's kind of bad news is because about 1.2 million open tech jobs by 2018 that's jobs that need to be filled and that's kind of bad news is because it spent it costs on average $20,000 per new reason for that is because only about one offer is made for every roughly 30 Tech candidates that means as Tech recruiters and hiring managers you're spend your time you know sifting through res resum and pre-screening and interviewing like up to 30 people where you actually find that awesome candidate this is a big problem with check and I would an even bigger problem with Linux which is why we've all joined today to see how we can improve how you do these things for Linux so come up all of that in another tech leader words Mark and he's from Mark and Andre har with Venture Capital um our company are dying for talent and you can read the rest of the your quote at your leisure but def really true even in the Silicon Valley even the Hub of Technology everyone is struggling by your top technology Talent the market is huge but the pool is small and the pool of truly qualified candidates is smaller and finding those truly qualified candidates is what sucking up all of your time as Tech recruiters and hiring managers the biggest challenges that you're probably seeing right now are sourcing um building a a funnel of talented Tech professionals screen identifying who the best candidate for those interviews are interviewing them uh effective assessing those candidates skills during interview and then ultimately hiring them create an enough package that makes them want to join your team so these are four challenges that Packer rank has tried to focus on and so before we jump stud rank I think it's important that we kind of understand how hacker rank for work actually uh functions first and I promise we'll get to the Linux part of the presentation very soon but if this context will help you for one talks about shter Rank and what it does so for particular challenges hacker rank approaches them all a little bit differently on the screen and screening side we have what we call code Sprints Cod Sprint is basically a hackathon for programming it's onite or it's online where hundreds or thousands of program come along to take the same set of code challenges um and Bas get Autos scored on a global leaderboard so this is a great way to have 100 thousands of potential Tech candidates come to you and Screen themselves for your organization and everyone has career Pages everyone posts stuff on their career pages so what we also offer is what we call public facing code challenges and this is basically a problem that any candidate can come solve with code so they'll come to career page and they'll complete a code Challenge and then score will automatically get forwarded to you as a tech recruiter so basically this candidate's already done like a figger job for you they their interest in this position and they've completed a coach CH so you can pre-screen them before you talk to them on the phone them via email so two powerful to there for sourcing and screening on the screening and interviewing side we have C scens and this is basically where you um mer together three or four specific code challenges that youve picked or built and you screen a specific candidate in these three or four codes and then another kind comprehensive or on how they did on these particular code challenges this is a really great way to this person is a a good fifth for your specific role you can use built-in code challenges or you can build your own which means you can really F tune exactly for what you're looking for on the interview and hiring side of things we have a code pair pair is where you combine a code challenge with a live video interview so a flying candidates out to you to watch them code in person you can save a whole lot of money on time and travel expense by doing this via the web but obviously want to see how they code so we combine the video components you can interact with your candid and then that with the code challenge so you can see exactly what their code scill atud is so kind of like the foundation of what the hacker rank for work platform does and it's going to just be helpful when Chris starts talking about what pseudo rank does specifically for those you already know what hacker rank does I apologize um we're getting to the pseudo rink really soon a few quick stats on hacker Rank and we feel that these numbers are important so you kind of have an idea of how studo Rank and hacker rank can be successful at your organization we've up to a million developers currently using the hacker ring platform we support 33 different languages we have 45,000 build challenges a th000 companies and 250 universities are using us and when we pulled all of these customers they said that on average as Tech recruiters they're saying about 70 to 80 hours of their time per hire so as Tech recruit I imagine you know every minute counts every you say there's another minute you can go to fill in another role or another great Tech recruiting initiative so imagine what you could do with 70 to 80 hours of your time save per hire and the benefit that hacker rank is going to offer you a lot of time talking about kind of like coding challenges and programmers um but there's kind of another aspect of um T talent and over technology that kind of gets overlooked in a lot of ways so think your data center every one of you who's attending this webinar right now ultimately your company has a data center whether it's on on premises with you whether it's in the cloud regardless you probably have websites and you have storefronts you have mobile apps any databases s QA tools you have all these things that live and breathe in your data center undoubtedly you all use some combination of these particular tools um lot of these things are run by Linux if they're not you know C+ plus word Java for the data center it's whether or not you know Linux and networking and things like that so you know whole kind of went out for us at hacker rank maybe like six or seven months ago and we said this is a target we really need to um you know this is a target we really have to go after let's make our hacker R for work platform even more robust you know and in terms of Linux Hing you all relate to this 97% of survey hiring managers are looking to bring on more Linux in the next six months that's from the 2015 Linux report that literally just came out about a week ago but as you already know with tech hiring this is you know e said than done because there's not a huge pool of tech candidates let alone candidates that really know Linux scripting and that do half of them don't know enough Linux scrip scripting so it to even longer to screen and interview candidates see what their actual Linux skill level is so um that Bally oh sorry I have a quote um and so this kind of sums up what I've been talking about right Jeff Hayden of magazine hiring the right people is critical for any business we all know that not because the right people will help Drive business but also because the wrong people will put you on the wrong track drag everyone else down and they'll slow down all your projects and then you have to hire someone else so 3 6 9 12 however many months you lost with that four hire so it's even more crucial for your data set which has to run 247 simply it's even more critical to sure you bring on the right uh people with the right skills and ultimately rank decided to launch its pseudo rank platform so further Ado I'm going to pass this on to Chris our Solutions engineer um thank you for uh letting me take you through kind of like the industry challenges and how hack rank is aiming to solve those now Chris is going to show you a lot more detail on studo rank hey thanks Tom this is Chris so let's uh let me talk a little bit about super Rank and then I'll go right into a live demo really I've looked at rums and I've seen you know someone put Linux on their resume and I'm like what does that really mean right did they did they install a bunch you for five minutes and maybe start a chrome or thing on it or do they actually know how to you know data center or do uh Des or system admin task so stud rank is really going to allow you to evaluate the candidate skills they getting before making the higher right so what it lets you do is server and in this spin up this environment where candidat can actually log in scripting challenges that you decide and these can be completely custom based on the jobs you're hiring for and likely you know these paths are going to be fresh right so they're not the candid going to be on their feet you're going to see how they respond different scen be able to pick and choose from candids based on how they did on those scenarios and you can have automatic gr TS and be able to rank your candidate pool and be able to quickly identify who the candidates are that actually know Linux skills those that maybe just installed Linux and say yeah I'm putting on my resume this is going to give you objective criteria that help accelerate those top cands through your piping so you can make a hire more and also make a better hire um let's go over to the platform so we have a simple web login so if I logged in as a recr um simple so you get your credentials you log in and you get taken to this dashboard so as Tom mentioned before um covers L but also covers you know the 33 other languages that we talked about so in this Bo you have all your tests so your team here can actually create or Engineers as well can create administer these test to your new candidates so engineering team could essentially create a test either from library questions or create own candidates take that challenge and then have them stack red and I'll show you what that looks like in a little bit um but first I want to since this focus is really on Linux I'm going to focus on the challenges so I already have one created and it's sudo rank challenge so this is essentially a test uh that we've created and once you create the test once you can reuse it over and over and over again for any number of Cates and let me show you what this looks like from the candidate perspective and what goes what it looks like from more of an administrative standpoint so we already have this test set up and good to go so what we can do is actually to take a challenge they receive a link that looks something like this uh I do want to mention this page is completely brandable to your company right so you know if I or company I could put my company logo here I could have my messaging in the instructions you know maybe describing what the test about the information that I want to collect so let's say I'm looking for a devad off position maybe I'm at new hires I could essentially ask for higher information platform and give me a second so on the type of position that you're hiring for what you can actually do is change settings on the test you can actually I can collect college gpa collect resume and that completes a challenge will generate a report for your team to inspect and it will have all the information here so you can comp put candidates on objective criteria based on how they did on the assessment so into this page and what I can do is I I go to the this main question right so I can launch the server um launching this should take you know either like a couple minutes or so um I I'll go back and and show you what's actually going to be in this test from an admin perspective so you essentially Define a problem statement right and in this problem statement you can the candidate say this is going to be a server task it's going to start up your own like its own isolated server like a kind of a Sandbox the candate can get through these challenges in and what's cool is that you can actually um set up these stand boxes however you want so really flexible is that you can install tools from the internet like if you're hiring for a devop position so might be familiar with Chef or or puppet um you could actually install these tools ahead of time so as the server is booting up those tools installed so the candidate can be up and ready R and demonstrate his or her skills by cting the task you decide um this is a three task test but let me just show you what a task looks like um that's what you're going to have with these tests is there's going to be one one main test and it's going to be composed of all these different Linux tasks relatively simple one we're just asking the candidate to extract the filey that it contains know this this specific not a particularly difficult task but you know maybe someone that's not familiar with Linux uh may not be able to do it and if you're looking for a Devo position um critical to make sure that they have the cenal Bic skills before you know you use Engineers time bring them on for an on-site just to make sure that they they have the skills that they say they do um so this is the setup so this is going to be run the they get into the server so I said before you can install tools you can set up directory structure how you want to set it up um and then after the task is done you can say you write a check script that will essentially confirm that the kid did it correctly and if you want to you could you could have an example solution so you can have an example solution to solve task um clean up if you want to the stuff that was created after that task and as the candidate does get the score so you imagine you can create as many tasks you want 10 tasks you're going to get candidates with varing performance all over the board in terms of how they do on these tests so if someone gets a perfect score and is able do all the tasks you you a cand on your hand that hasal and you want to spend time with it before like on site and you can test beforehand before actually investing time with your engineers so you can filter out those that don't have the skills um so this is just one task um like I said before you know each each test is gonna have multiple tasks what this looks like the candid perspective so as in again you'll see at the here she will see at the top you know the score that's left in the session your logo here and then we'll see on the left a simple task description again this is all up to you so what message you want to put the candid the option so if the candid is more comfortable doing server or systems admin stuff through the terminal here can log into this instance of of Ubuntu and be able to complete challenges uh through that terminal or you can through the webshell and I'll just demonstrate from the webshell side automatically log the candidate in and the cand start working on the Tas over here so I see my first task is to extract this file you know maybe can I could I could be in here I could you know see have been set up I see I already there's there's a chef file in here here I could start creating some files I could say um sample files and exract part of the challenge and what's cool about this is we're when it's actually done doing all this uh you record everything that the candidate is doing so I report and I'll show you that later um we're actually taking record of every command the cand used to solve a challenge the automatic grading on the backend so candid maybe does the challenges correctly but you want to take a deeper dive and look at handed approach the challenge that that report will always be there for your team to look at and reference later so it's a complete catalog history of how the C approach the chall this is especially for those um those assessments where you may not always have someone there to do the challenge and with this can do the challenge on his or her own and you can R later so if you have a large quality quantity of candidates and you want to quickly identify who has skills um there way to do that Advance those that did really well forward um you know I actually completed this challenge um essentially go back to this or a bond there's also submit I could with the test and it completes the test recruiting team or your engineering team can receive a notification saying that the test was completed and it's going to be Autos score based on you know those those scripts I showed um and you actually review those with your team we can see here that for this particular challenge we had 28 candidats that completed it after the challenge they automatically receive a score and you know a lot of these you can assign the score how you want it to be assigned but I've decided it because that's going to be a perfect score right we have we got that maximum score was 10 and quickly identify those at the top really well right we can actually see that you know the candid got all the challenges right they were maybe we want to spend additional time with them but I think this is where a lot of value can be derived is identify those that maybe aren't ready for this kind kind of position so you don't necessarily need to bring them on site to have to have them do an interview with one of your engineers because they don't have the Baseline skills that you're looking for um so the here is really twofold so also it will help you accelerate your candidat that you have through the pipeline so you can get them hired faster but on the side allow you to send to save your recruiter time on candid that may not be ready to do a particular job and you can create whatever challenges or tasks you want to make um so those apps are really tailored to your specific job role let me look at this particular report so if we look at John's report he did he did excellent on this particular assessment um we look at his candidate profile so we have a complete history of John and everything he's done around hacker rank so he did you know certain different challenges you know he attempted these um look at this the rank challenge so you're going to get a detailed report that you're ire team is able to look at so you can see the candidate feedback that they left after the test on you can look at the perform on the test and we can see here that you know the K had this one pass to complete U the check log so for every task you assign the candidate this check essentially tells you that you're on a different task you assign the candidate and then we have the download so you can download the kids approach challenge show the entire bash command history and the complete session recording files and what's what the session recording files is actually play them again in the ter terminal and it'll essentially give you the recording of that terminal session that the candidate did so you can review it just as if you were sitting there right there with the candidate doing the challenge and then we have the timeline where you see where the time was spent during that so we can see you know you do the question listing went to question one and then each St was offline um so for we're recording you know whether the connection was there so if a candidate says hey I actually disconnected you can actually confirm that and time to the candidate's test if it's actually a valid claim or claim you can say you were you were working on question one the entire time uh you know this question was not meant to be that difficult you know why did it take you 60 Minutes to do question one um this is adding another dimension to you know your assessment so you can actually see the thought process the candidate as challenge was being Tak all right to show you around pseudo rank um and last thing for every candidate that takes this particular ch um you can share the candidate reports with other team members you can download them as PDFs downlo as Excel so you all that data available for you available for you to share with your team and your catalog so um there's no lot it's always here for you to reference so anytime you know deed does one of these um always reference that report always reference that score so and wrap up here that pack work in particular stud rank is really a three-step process at an end it's really the sourcing right so what you can do is you can actually embed challenges um on site so you can you can say something along the line of you know one increase your chances of getting hired for like a Dev office position click here the Linux challenge or something like that and have a link directly to this Challenge and then the candidate does well in the challenge you can accelerate that candidate through the hiring process um beted them with the challenge so that's a huge benefit the thing is screening so like I said before we're stack ranking all candidates that are coming in here completing these challenges you can spend time on the candidates that have the skills and less time on on those that necessarily maybe aren the particular job and then lastly hire right so hire is the most important assessment are going to increase the chances that you're going to hire a candidate that actually has the skills and reduce your chances of having a candidate that you know maybe inflated their resume um skills based assessments are going to get straight to the point and be able to show you if the has the skills or not all I wanted to open it up for questions uh anyone has questions for either myself or or Tom uh that up a few people have actually CH if you have a question just type it in you can type it to everyone or you can type it to us directly we have you come in during the presentation first question was uh can you confirm that pseudo rank will will autoscore its scripting code challenges uh and definitely true when you so basically when you define the question you will also Define um like the expected output um once your candidate submits their submission we'll check their output versus expected output um so we do auto score if you want to dive deeper into how long they took or you know the exact command line they did if you want to dive deeper into their answer then you would just go to to the few detailed report you could either watch the report or view the history um another another question good question um what's the max of tasks that I can add to a pseudo rank chenge pass that to Chris sure so you can create as many pseudo rank challenges as you want and we don't cap you on that so if you want to have a challenge where you essentially gave a candidate you know 100 Taps to do I'm not necessarily recommending that but we don't we tap you on number of TS you assign the candidate and again every task can be autog graded so you can quick so you can quickly identify candidate it's Bas performance awesome okay another question can I choose any OS I want um I'm just the marketing also Chris our technical Guru right so by default we a unique instance of Ubuntu for candidates to do these T every time so each candidate is going to have their own uh UB box to work in but we all also support other Linux operating systems Zora or red hat um the simple on our end so if you want to test them red hat skill definitely do that um is not on is not currently supported but we do have Linux operating systems up and running right now kind of technical question can I create my own server images with a bunch of software pre-loaded right so what you can actually do and and if you recall back to what I was showing on each on each challenge there's something called a setup phase and that in that setup phase while that server is spinning up you can actually install any packages you want before the server is loaded so to install Chef you want to install puppet you can do that in the we're actually creating a unique unique instance and that's the the moment it's ready hand will have all that all those tools available from use so creating your own um server environment through the Set uh and then how much time does it take to spin up an instance does that time count against the candidate time limit I'm pretty sure I know the answer but again I pass to Chris or resent expert spent uh to configure a specific server is going to vary based on how many tools you're installing right um but doesn't count against the canis time limit so you in the beginning you know we had like like a preest phase where they 30 minutes to let's say start the server and then we do the loading there and that does not count against T time with it uh the time limit that they get is SP on the platform so challenge I showed earlier they had 45 minutes um the server was up and running next question do you have any methods suggestions to keep people from relying too heavily on Google I screen caps of their desktop um I'll pass to Chris as well right you know when it comes to something like uh and I think the question might become something like plagiarism right like you don't people referencing the internet I want to see their raw skills um so we don't actually like screen capture their desktop um what we record the terminal session so if you wanted to play back exactly how the candidate was approaching a particular task like if he was completely down the wrong path and then all of a sudden there was inspiration um you know support all of that but I think you know Google is an important part of like a server admins or a system admins toolkit right being able to look at a task and then quickly be able to um right solution so if if the candid is resourceful enough to find the answer appropriate on goog that matches the challenge I think that's good candidate there um but again we do record um everything so you can answer it later if you want to awesome questions definitely appreciate more keep coming in um is there suggestion for launching multiple instances to accomplish multiple tests on a one-onone basis versus multiple test on server launch so this question um so is are taking the pseudo rank pseudo rank challenge we spin up a new instance based on your setup script those tools installed already multiple instances these instances are completely isolated from each other so what we do is we actually block um kind of a technical answer we block inbound requests to um the instance or the the Ubuntu instance that we've created forand but the has full access to to access packages so if you wanted to wanted to download chef and you didn't have them do that already they can definitely do that it's just one test to one instance also ask questions similar to like security restrictions on the user account rout access sandbox hopefully answers everyone's questions who asked about that so again uh each user basically gets access to their own instance and that instance does not interact with other instances and then uh is Ubuntu the only supported when point this earlier currently we support um we do support flavors of of so we do have you know Fedora red hat and Ubuntu so if youest on different operating systems you can but by default um a pretty a pretty solid pretty platform can do a lot of the tasks so we have that as a default operating system but it we can change it on the back end if you wanted to test something else um the instances have access to the net so the candidate could connect other machines do is uh so it's basically we we spend up a little box for the candidate to do these challenges in and it's like an auntu or an operating system box the candid can do these challenges um allow them to make outgoing requests to the internet and SSH to another machine if they wanted to but again that's all recorded what we do block are requests from the outside trying to get into the candidates box so um we're very we're very tight shop here I mean all all of our server images are managed through AWS um so they're here they abide by all of Amazon rule set incredibly reliable so if you get a lot of traffic you have a lot of CID facing these challenges we scale automatically so you don't need to worry about that um it's it's very secure we keep them locked down pretty tight from effective and then so another question do you have predefined tests so we don't need to create our own we do some predefined tests and we're adding more uh every day actually um we've gotten a lot of feedback that people actually do typically want to create their own tests at least for the the more in-depth screening and like interview phases uh most people rely on the buil-in stuff like the career page kind of like the basic V A lot of people Express an interest in creating their own so you can do both and like I said we are adding R challenges pretty much um actually show that on the WebEx um the challenge that Chris did was I believe a built-in challenge so that would technically be there as a starter challenge for anyone to do uh and we do have uh obviously uh like the library that you be able to like search through and pick tests from [Music] so um add to that question as well when it comes to the theing challenges really we try to emphasize you know you complete freedom to create whatever kind of challenge you want to give the candidate you a couple examples to get started so we can we can if you up for a trial or you you work with uh or you end up partner with us to work on to create challenges we give you a couple to get started start and then about creating your own challenges specific to your roles you're hiring for so it's a ton of freedom and we create like a stand box to create any kind of test you want okay um let's see uh this is a very detailed question uh if we want a candidate to to debug a network connection between two VMS is it possible to spin up two first with the connection between them is so we configure adding and fire rules looks like I like an answer to this question huh uh let me let me think about that a moment right so architecture works right now is we have we partner with AWS so we essentially have one virtual machine that spins up a ton of servers and basically the resources are automatically scaled based on how many candidates are taking the test so the firewall rules are actually um the actual firewall rule on these on these instances are fixed by AWS right so we don't want candidat coming in here and attempting to like hack you know pseudo rank but if they if they could do that that'd be pretty impressive right but what you can do is uh for example with like chef and puppet you can actually ask the candid to create like scripts to configure things so if you wanted to to have to demonstrate his or her skills with teally setting up these uh specific considerations for security um you could definitely do that the thing is when it comes to actually messing with these instances we we don't want candidates to be able to you know mess mess with the logs or to you know tamper files are not supposed to be so we keep it locked down in that regard very once again thank you Chris for U bringing all this knowledge because I would not have been able to answer um pretty much any of these questions thank you everyone these have been great questions we'll give everyone you know maybe like 30 uh for questions where do you find them they're just in in the the library right Chris so sud rank is uh is a new offering sud rank's been on the market for about you know been working with different companies trying to make this as robust as possible um we have a couple questions right now already created um and it it's more like a one-off basis so what you can do is you can actually email support and copy over those example questions to get you started but it's more about uh you can actually you so if you decide to go with us we walk through the enti process of of using rank for work around pseudo rank so if there's any questions there um but there are a couple questions that we do have that we can share so if you have account and you want to see some example questions uh just shoot us I of the questions so thank you everyone that was definitely a lively Q&A uh we appreciate everyone's questions and attention um thank you again for uh get out the right we hope it was helpful uh if you other questions you can certainly feel free myself or Chris you can call us the number as well um start a free trial hacker rank.com workso rank uh once again thanks everyone for attending we hope it was informative and we look forward to seeing you on the next one take thank you