Gaming the Hiring Process Literally: Job Prospects Code Against Each Other To Demonstrate Superiority

Digital Darwinism. JL

Chris O'Brien reports in Venture Beat:

Tech companies hiring remains heavily biased. CodeFights is focusing the hiring process on skills rather than a resume or university degree. Programmers create free accounts and then play in challenges against each other, or against bots built by the company. There are features that track the players’ skill levels over time. Companies use CodeFights for free until they hire a programmer, at which point they pay a referral fee of 15 percent of the first-year salary.
CodeFights, which hopes to make hiring of programmers more meritocratic, says it has raised $10 million in a series A round.
The San Francisco-based company raised a $2.5 million seed round 18 months ago, and it has since partnered with companies such as Uber, Dropbox, Asana, and Quora to develop coding challenges that are used to identify recruiting targets. The company says its revenue has doubled each of the past four months.
“People like to believe that we live in a meritocracy, where individuals are valued based on their skills and abilities and not their titles, but the truth is, we do not,” said CodeFights founder and CEO Tigran Sloyan in a statement. “The brand of your school and workplace are really the only things that determine your place in the talent market. CodeFights is on a mission to change that by improving access to world class education and focusing on competency above all else in recruiting.”
In recent years, tech companies in Silicon Valley have battled perceptions that their hiring remains too heavily biased in favor of white men even as they deny critics’ charges of prejudice. CodeFights argues it can help with that blindspot by focusing the hiring process on actual skills rather than a resume or university degree.

On CodeFights, programmers create free accounts and then play in challenges against each other, or against bots built by the company. There are leaderboards, points, and other features that track the players’ skill levels over time. That strategy has expanded to include branded gaming challenges with partners who help design the games.

Companies can use CodeFights for free until they actually hire a programmer from the platform, at which point they pay a referral fee of 15 percent of the first-year salary to the company.

The latest round of funding was led by e.ventures, but also included SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, A Capital, and Granatus Ventures. Mathias Schilling, the cofounder and managing partner of e.ventures, and Charlie Songhurst, the former head of corporate strategy at Microsoft, have joined CodeFights’ board.