Win a game, land a job? Coding contests help recruit engineers

The hitch with traditional hiring — resume, phone interview, in-person interviews, in-house tests — is that “only very far into the interviewing process do you see how talented the candidate is,” he said.

Uber worked with CodeFights to develop a timed, competitive coding game called UberBot, tailored to its ride-hailing app: figure out the optimal route for a car or the best match for passengers splitting a ride, for instance.

Hackathon auditions for jobs aren’t new — Google’s Code Jam competition is in its 13th year, for instance — but they are picking up steam in an increasingly competitive hiring market.

“The hardest problem many companies face is growing their team,” said Abhay Parekh, CEO and co-founder of Lytmus, which just created a four-step system for finding talent, including game-like challenges.

Recruitment gamification “is powerful and useful,” said Josh Bersin, a principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP in Oakland, who has studied the trend.

Karl Kapp, a professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania and author of the book “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction,” said games for employee screening have several advantages:

CodeFights started as an educational tool for learning math (its original name was MathFights), then morphed into coding education, and two months ago added the recruitment aspect.

CodeFights works with clients’ engineers to develop custom games, and is compensated just like a headhunter when a competition leads to a hire.

“Instead of spending engineers’ and recruiters’ time to find good candidates, we do all that work for them in a way that’s fun for the applicant,” said Tigran Sloyan, CodeFights CEO and co-founder.

[...] poker and chess are widely popular to watch and there’s no action, just a bunch of nerdy people around a table.

With $7.2 million in venture backing, it created tools for a prescreen, phone screen, online coding challenge and then a hands-on project during the in-person interview.

“We try to make it as realistic as possible,” Parekh said, tailoring the games to each company’s business.

Beyond tech talent, Parekh said, Lytmus will expand into recruiting for fields like financial analyst, accountant and customer support — “any profession where you have to use a computer to accomplish your task.”