Recruitment

Digital transformation has brought about an unprecedented change in recruitment practices around the globe.

Companies are increasingly changing their human resource practices (Deloitte 2017) and using artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to assess and interview candidates.

Online web-based platforms, such as freelance and competitive programming platforms, are also gaining in popularity for recruiting workers in two ways.

First, online web-based platforms are a growing means of hiring workers with specific skills, as they algorithmically match workers to the vacancies and tasks of business entities and offer them customised services.

The matching services are provided by both freelance and competitive programming platforms.

Freelance platforms, such as Toptal, exclusively specialise in matching workers from their talent community to businesses; the workers can be contracted on an hourly, part-time or full-time basis.

These platforms provide companies with a choice of workers with whom they can engage before the decision to hire or not is taken. Similarly, Upwork offers a “Payroll” service, a premium service offered through third-party providers to hire workers under an employment relationship.

It also collaborates with large tech companies such as Microsoft and offers them these services so that they can have better access to a skilled workforce.

Such matching services are also provided by competitive programming platforms, such as HackerRank, HackerEarth, Kaggle and Topcoder.

These platforms offer “talent as a service” to businesses, and based on their needs recommend workers with specific technical skills from their respective communities of programmers, developers and data scientists.

Nowadays recruitment can be done all over the world.

Services

Second, competitive programming platforms, such as HackerRank, HackerEarth and Kaggle, help companies to organise the recruitment process.

These platforms offer different types of subscription plans or customised services to businesses for recruitment services in the fields of data science, AI and other technological domains.

The recruitment services provided include screening and short-listing workers with specific skills and competencies, who can then be interviewed by the companies.

This speeds up the screening process, thereby making recruitment more efficient for businesses and at the same time reducing the efforts and costs of hiring.

Platforms

To assess workers’ technical skills, these platforms organise hackathons, competitions and other challenges, which are often algorithmically programmed and conducted either online with the participation of developers from around the world, or in specific locations, such as university campuses.

The services provided by platforms such as HackerRank reduce the time lags for businesses in generating a shortlist of qualified candidates for a job, apart from assisting in removing bias in the selection process (Grooms 2017). In addition, such platforms assist businesses to hire talented individuals who demonstrate advanced design thinking and capabilities and can provide solutions across a range of sectors.

Several companies such as Adobe, Altimetrik, and others use these recruitment services offered by competitive programming platforms (Babu 2015).

The demand for such services by companies has been growing over the past decade.

For instance, HackerEarth has more than 750 corporate customers worldwide across various sectors of the economy, such as Amazon, L&T Infotech, Wipro and UBS, which use their platform for recruitment (Bhalla 2017; Babu 2015).

These platforms thus seem to be altering traditional recruitment practices in some companies.

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