Recruiting startup Interview Street is making a move onto college campuses (virtually speaking).

The company helps employers recruit programmers by holding online coding contests to test their skills. Right now, co-founder Vivek Ravisankar says the average CodeSprint coder has between zero and 3.5 years of work experience — in other words, they’re pretty fresh out of college. Still, a lot of recruiting starts even earlier. So why not try to find the most talented programmers while they’re still in school?

To that end, Interview Street has launched a Summer Games feature, giving college students a chance to prove their programming mettle while they’re on summer vacation. Basically, students complete different coding changes, then they’re ranked individually and by school. Right now, the games are in their “warm up” phase, then on June 24 they’ll start the trials, where contestants can win up to $500, and in July the games will move into finals, with a prize of up to $1,000. (Anyone can try to complete the challenges, but only college students can win the prizes.)

Ravisankar says the current site focuses on artificial intelligence tests, namely programming computer players to win at games like tic tac toe and anti-chess (where the goal is to lose your pieces as quickly as possible). Eventually, he plans to add other types of programming challenges. Still, it seems appropriate that he started with tasks that match the Summer Games theme.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Interview Street, the startup that helps companies recruit by holding programming contests called CodeSprints, is doing something a little different this week — it’s holding a CodeSprint for 13 different startups, all backed by Sequoia Capital.

The CodeSprints started out as big events with a long list of recruiting companies, but while there are still plans for more comprehensive CodeSprints in the future, Interview Street started holding smaller, more frequent events, usually tied to a specific company or technology. It even did a CodeSprint with the White House, and it’s working on a second.

So why go with a single CodeSprint for a bunch of Sequoia companies? Co-founder Vivek Ravisankar says, “They have funded some of the best tech startups. So instead of doing it individually for each startup, it’s a single gate.” The participating employers include Inkling, Natera, BubbleMotion, EventBrite, TuneIn, Outright, PocketGems, Birst, Barracuda Networks, Tokbox, Sugar Inc., Backplane, and Synapsense.

You can read more details about the Sequoia CodeSprint here. It’s going to be held on Saturday, April 14, from 3pm to 8pm Pacific.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Y Combinator-backed Interview Street is accelerating the pace of its CodeSprints, where programmers prove their worth to potential employers by completing coding problems in a limited period of time.

The startup held its second big CodeSprint last month. The event seems like a success — 5,221 people participated, 665 of them actually applied to companies, and co-founder Vivek Ravisankar tells me that more than 100 of those applicants are now in the final round of interviews. More than 86 companies participated — and judging from the applications, Facebook was the most desirable employer, followed by Microsoft and Quora.

(By the way, if you agree with the CodeSprint participants and are dying to work for Facebook, you don’t have to wait for another event — just complete the Facebook Programming Challenge right now, which is of course powered by Interview Street.)

Interview Street’s next CodeSprint is tentatively scheduled for sometime in May. If that seems like a long time away, the company is also planning smaller sprints. Instead of holding a 48-hour event for nearly 100 employers, these CodeSprints only last for four or five hours, and normally focus on one organization, or a specific skillset. The next one, on February 25, is all about backend programming, and there are 19 participating companies.

After that, it looks like there will be one or two CodeSprints every week, at least through mid-March. There will be a mobile-focused CodeSprint on March 17 for Quora, Stripe, and other companies.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Talk to any tech company and they’ll tell you that hiring quality programmers is an incredibly difficult task — the smaller companies often have a hard time getting in front of the best candidates, and the large and ‘hot’ companies are inundated with applications, many of them sub par.

Interview Street is a new Y Combinator-funded startup that’s setting out to fix both of these problems — and to save everyone involved a whole lot of time. The service, which comes out of beta today, makes it easy for tech companies to test applicants’ skills using puzzles (and it makes it easy for potential applicants to figure out who’s hiring).

Head to the site and you’ll see that it’s broken into two sections: one for ‘Challenges’, and another for ‘Recruit’. The first is catering to engineers looking to land jobs at companies like Dropbox, Facebook, or Airbnb. Sign in and you’ll be able to take one of three coding challenges, which you’ll complete using a web-based IDE (you can copy and paste your code into the app if you’d like). The web-based code checker supports C, C++, C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Haskell, MySQL, and Bash, and generates results immediately.

Click the second tab and you’ll be in the half of the site that’s geared toward recruiters. Here, companies can create their own tests, and they can manage their dashboard of applicants.

Right now the coding puzzles on Interview Street are pretty standard, but cofounder Vivek Ravisankar says that in the future, the company wants to offer more ‘real-world’ tests — things like deploying an application to AWS, or integrating functions from Twitter’s API into an iPhone app. Ravisankar explains that the programming puzzles prospective engineers take as part of their application process often don’t apply directly to the roles they’d be filling, and Interview Street wants to change that.

At launch Interview Street is offering three puzzles to solve, and it will be adding more in the coming weeks . The site will also soon be allowing companies to upload their own puzzles (so, for example, Facebook could upload its own puzzle and test cases that all prospective applicants would have to complete).

Of course, many tech companies already offer puzzles to potential applicants. But Ravisankar says that the typical submission process for these is clunky, with applicants sending attachments that have to be manually tested by an engineer. Interview Street automates this process. So far the service is in use by major companies including Facebook and a bevy of Y Combinator alums like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Justin.tv.

The service offers a 30 day free trial. After that plans begin at $99 a month, with pricing scaling upward depending on how many tests applicants are taking (the higher-end plans also let you take advantage of a ‘live playback’ mode, so you can see an applicant’s thought/coding process, and a white labeling feature).

Competitors to Interview Street include CodeEval (covered here) and Gild (covered here).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch