It was in college that Sachin Gupta first realized the flaws with traditional skill assessment tests.
When companies came to hire fresh graduates, it wasn’t always the most capable candidates who bagged top jobs.
“Figuring out someone’s technical competency shouldn’t be as hard and be indexed on a single day and two hours of interviews,” explains Sachin, who co-founded HackerEarth, a coding assessment platform.
This belief in fair, effective evaluation is at the core of his work at HackerEarth. Sachin taps into his engineering mindset and uses a structured approach to solve problems and improve how companies assess technical skills.
In our chat, he highlights skills becoming more important as AI takes over repetitive tasks and discusses how to evaluate them. Read on to learn more about his take on the so-called war for talent and the latest trends in recruitment.
This interview is part of G2’s Professional Spotlight series. For more content like this, subscribe to G2 Tea, a newsletter with SaaS-y news and entertainment.
What's your favorite beverage? When do you enjoy it?
I've become used to my morning coffee. I have it black, without sugar. I've sampled a lot of coffee beans, and I am particular about them.
What was your first job?
So, I've only had three jobs, including one internship at Microsoft. The second was a three-month stint at Google. We were already on track to build HackerEarth then.
At Microsoft, I interned in the cloud department under a manager who was still figuring things out. Sometimes, she’d assign me a task and forget about it. I clocked in around 10 a.m. and worked until 11 p.m.
I took this role without knowing much about production-grade coding, so it was a challenge.
I also learned to say ‘no’ at Microsoft, something my manager helped me understand. If we say ‘yes’ to everything, we may not be able to focus on it and end up doing a poor job. This is worse than not doing it in the first place.
You can be fine with some things with suboptimal output. But for most, the quality of output matters a lot. So saying ‘no’ is as important as saying ‘yes’.
What’s your favorite software in your current tech stack?
One is Gusto, a payroll tool.
In the beginning, we had a small team in the US without an HR. I was setting up our payroll. Managing payroll in the US is complicated, as there are state tax laws. The platform onboarded us smoothly. They solved a complex problem.
The other is Linear, an alternative to Jira. It’s designed for developers and has a slick user interface and many shortcuts.
What problems at work make you want to throw your laptop out of the window?
After running a startup for so long, you get used to things going wrong. So, my threshold for frustration has become higher.
I hate those situations where people don't think through. Let's say you're given a task, and you do a shoddy job. You complete it for the sake of it without caring about the quality of the output.
This is extremely frustrating because you spend time initially detailing the plan and what’s expected, and then you spend time reviewing a suboptimal output.
Time is a valuable commodity. You account for work, hobbies, and time with family, and then you have to account for such blocks, too. I try to be as productive as possible. When anything impedes that, it’s frustrating for me.
Sidharth Yadav: How’s your professional journey been so far? What inspired you to start HackerEarth?
Sachin Gupta: Back in 2012, HackerEarth’s journey started out of intellectual curiosity. My co-founder Vivek Prakash and I were about to graduate from college and go for job placements.
We realized then how, despite studying computer science for three years, we couldn’t build much apart from writing a few coding programs. We also noticed how inefficient the whole hiring process was, resulting in a loss for both talent and companies.
Realizing the skill assessments conducted during these college placements were not up to the mark formed the basis for building HackerEarth.
However, we were looking at the hiring process only from the candidate’s point of view. Understanding that companies also struggle to spot talent, we consulted industry experts to build a product prototype.
This prototype, which was the earliest version of HackerEarth, was approved by many of the experts, making us realize it was worth taking a shot at.
If we didn’t make it, we could always get a full-time job.
On your LinkedIn profile, you've stressed using an engineer’s mindset to solve business problems. How do you define this approach?
Being an engineer is an attitude or a mindset. It's less about the professional degree but more about the thinking style it develops for you.
In the early stages of HackerEarth, we were focused on community building. Many users came to our platforms for coding assignments, but they didn’t fill out their profile details, which was useful information for us. We realized this was a process issue.
So, we devised a hack and asked users to email us their resumes to mailyourresume@hackerearth.com. We then collaborated with a BPO, which filled in profile details using those resumes. We would then conduct automated checks to see if the data was ready.
We could have spent three to four months trying to build an automated solution, which would still be inefficient. Reliance on human-led verification would still be needed. This process took off for us. This is an example of the application of an engineer’s mindset.
“The more you break down a problem into its constituent parts, the easier it becomes to solve it. You can apply this knowledge to any area of life.”
Sachin Gupta
Founder and Executive Chairman, HackerEarth
Besides, you’ll see many people getting too obsessed with their assessments, emotions, and perspectives relating to a situation. An engineer’s mind doesn’t think about problems and solutions independently. We think about them together.
Sometimes, people don’t even know what the problem is, but they’ll have a solution. The best software developers take a day or two to think about the solution before implementation.
What's the scope of AI in skills assessments? What are the opportunities and limitations in this area?
In the future of software development, much of the code will be generated by AI and not written by humans. This means the output from smaller teams will be significantly more.
Today, coders need abstract thinking and a problem-solving mindset, with generating code being no longer a challenge. Software development jobs aren’t going anywhere. Instead, we will see a productivity boom, with developers potentially becoming five times more effective with AI assisting them in new ways.
This means the way skills are assessed needs to change. Methods that focus on evaluating technical skills in a binary and objective way—such as assessing whether a candidate’s code is logically correct—are no longer enough. We now need to assess problem-solving skills and get into the minds of coders.
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With AI, you can track the journey a candidate takes to arrive at the solution. For example, it can show the sections of code that were rewritten, giving a more qualitative understanding of their approach.
Generative AI also allows us to blend interviews and assessments, which used to be distinct steps. Top-of-the-funnel conversations are not very productive for candidates and hiring managers, so with conversational interfaces, you can conduct the first round of interviews through an AI system.
This doesn’t mean you completely remove the human aspect of interviewing.
AI, in its present state, can’t assess individuals' personalities. For this, you must have a human-to-human conversation with them.
In fact, candidates are using AI more often to write resumes and personalize outreaches. So, it’s getting harder to know them merely based on these signals from AI-enabled assessment platforms.
Hence, there is a greater need for more engaged human conversations to get to know candidates better.
What are the skills companies must look for in candidates when mundane and repetitive tasks are being taken over by AI?
Companies must look for any signs of originality. This doesn’t mean I am against the use of generative AI. In fact, I am a proponent of its productivity gains.
However, if candidates are using such tools, they must know the fundamentals first. AI systems are probabilistic. No matter the accuracy, there is scope for error. So, candidates must know what could be wrong and why it is wrong.
Also, hobby projects such as open-source contributions in hackathons display a learner’s attitude making it a great way for companies to spot talent.
Innovation is another important skill to assess. Despite all the available tools, if you’re not innovating, you’re going down the narrow path of doing only what you’re asked to do at work.
Over the past decade, recruitment has shifted to a remote format for most companies. What’s the key to the success of hiring remotely?
Hiring remotely unlocks a wider talent pool for you.
Earlier, companies recruited from a limited network, including a few universities. Now, they can recruit candidates from anywhere in the world.“Know where you’re hiring from. Not every talent pool is the same.”
Sachin Gupta
Founder and Executive Chairman, HackerEarth
Different geographies bring different maturities of skill sets. For example, a software developer in the US is not the same as one in India.
Variability in distributed teams creeps in very easily. So it’s important to maintain standardized skill levels, particularly for larger organizations.
Second, be more intentional about yourself as a company while hiring globally.
In the past year, the slowdown in the tech industry has shifted power back to employers. There are more job seekers than there are jobs. But even then, smart talent has more options.
When you’re hiring beyond your immediate network, intentionally promote your brand to appear as an attractive workplace. Be sure to advocate your culture and the interesting problems you solve.
Some companies promote their brands by organizing hackathons. That helps them articulate the problems they’re trying to solve.
There has been a continuous string of layoffs in the tech world. How are assessment platforms like HackerEarth adapting to this trend?
The job market is not having an easy time. The volume of hiring has gone down in the past couple of years.
If you look at the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic, certain industries weren’t affected. Mass layoffs today are affecting the big tech companies more.
However, there are large organizations, especially outside of the tech space, that are undergoing transformations and hiring. Then you’ve got companies that used to face stiff competition for talent from Google and Meta, but now they’re in a position to hire aggressively.
So, a company like ours taps into these pockets of opportunities - focusing on areas where there’s still strong demand for talent, even as other sectors slow down.
Second, you must be resilient by diversifying your business model. For example, we hold hackathons to source candidates and engage talent. We also offer assessments for upskilling employees across companies.
We’ve experienced hiring booms and troughs in the past, and it will pick up again in the future. The idea is to look for adjacent opportunities to stay relevant.
Some experts claim there is a raging war for talent today. In the case of coders, is there enough talent with the required skills? If yes, are there enough jobs to accommodate this talent?
I think the demand for talent is always ahead of the supply. If you narrowly expect people to be productive from day one, there will be a shortage of talent.
However, the demand for skills evolves over time. For example, the machine learning skills in demand 18 months back are less relevant today because the focus has shifted more towards generative AI today and not just modeling.
“You should hire those with high learning abilities, even if they don’t have the required skills, and see if you can upskill them quickly with changing technologies.”
Sachin Gupta
Founder and Executive Chairman, HackerEarth
At the same time, there could be technologies entering a post-peak period. And the supply has caught up or even exceeded demand. In these areas, it may seem there’s no “war for talent.”
There’s no definite answer to this question because it depends heavily on the skill set you’re looking for.
There is always competition for good talent, but expecting new hires to be immediately productive is not the right approach. People who bring a learning attitude have a deeper affiliation with a company. They tend to stay longer and derive greater satisfaction from work.
Did you know that 60% of employees take more than a month to become proficient with AI tools? Discover more such insights from G2’s latest survey on AI use in businesses.
Follow Sachin Gupta on LinkedIn to learn more about emerging trends in skills assessment.
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