Case Study

How Vaticle found a tailor-made solution that solves the needs of a high-performing start-up with HackerEarth

About Vaticle

Vaticle is a London-based technology company that empowers engineers to solve complex problems using  their strongly-typed database, TypeDB, and its query language, TypeQL. 

Vaticle offers database programs with a logical type system and this technology helps organizations in various sectors, including Life Sciences, Defence & Security, Financial Services, and Robotics, to build intelligent systems to solve complex problems. 

It is the world’s first database that enables engineers to tackle a higher order of complexity in knowledge engineering. From financial analytics to drug discovery, cyber threat detection to robotics disaster recovery, Vaticle caters to various industry scenarios, and was awarded the Cambridge Computer Lab Ring Product of the year 2017. Vaticle was built with a mission to empower engineers to solve complex problems, starting at the database, and it’s pioneering community has grown to thousands of engineers around the world.

Requirements and challenges faced pre-HackerEarth

A technology first company, Vaticle has been actively hiring engineers for quite some time. After having used more than 3 technical screening tools, the recruitment team at Vaticle found that none of them were flexible enough to create questions easily nor did they solve their prevalent plagiarism concerns. The team often had to put in manual efforts to detect plagiarism even whilst employing a coding assessment tool. 

This urged them to create their own questions and made a platform that would highlight leaked questions within the question bank a necessity. They also wanted to standardize the questions for any role in a way that they all had the same level of difficulty.

Additionally, the creators of TypeDB, and its query language, TypeQL, the Vaticle team, wanted to create questions that are more relevant to their line of work.

The whole experience of being able to create questions, create a question bank, rotate the question etc. is quite novel. We didn’t even think a coding platform could serve that kind of function but turns out, HackerEarth did it.

Haikal Pribadi,
Founder and CEO
Vaticle

A major challenge that high performing start-ups often face is the presumption that for smaller hiring volumes, the assessment invites needed are also smaller. On the contrary, smaller teams need to often cast a wider net to ensure that the candidate is a right fit for the role. The selection process is even more difficult and the bar is set higher in these scenarios. Vaticle needed to send out thousands of invites to hire a few well-suited, top candidates. A coding platform that understood the hiring process at high-performing start-ups and could create a tailor-made solution to suit their hiring needs was one of their core requirements.

None of the competitors understood this and their plans did not allow high-performing start-ups like Vaticle to scale as needed. 

How HackerEarth helped

With HackerEarth, the Vaticle team curated a custom plan that suited their hiring needs and allowed them to send out bulk invites. The team could easily cancel the invites not used by candidates and add them back to their credits. Even when they run out of invites, they can incrementally add on more invites to their credits with ease, and this flexibility gives them the opportunity to cast a wide net and raise the bar for recruitment drives.

For any role at Vaticle, the key purpose of assessments is to identify if the candidates can code well and if they have a strong algorithmic background. The algorithmic test on HackerEarth acts as a filter to ensure that the candidates have the necessary skills before they can be moved to the interview stage. Post an introduction call, the candidates shortlisted through assessments further goes through cognitive tests, coding interview, logic interview, algorithmic interview and a systems architecture design interview. HackerEarth Assessments serve as the first stage of this rigorous hiring process and ensures that the team only connects 1-on-1 with candidates who have a strong algorithmic background.

The team assesses about 200 candidates monthly and shortlists the top candidates for the interviews. 

Here’s how the Vaticle team managed to deliver a superior candidate experience through HackerEarth Assessments:

  • Smooth user interface with pre-populated snippets and auto-complete that gave a comfortable coding experience.
  • 40+ programming languages for candidates to choose from.
  • Ability to create custom questions and standardize them based on difficulty levels helped them to identify the required skills sets. This ensured that the candidate was a right fit for the job.

The experience of the HackerEarth coding test is another feature that pulled the Vaticle team to HackerEarth. Comfortable coding interface and 40+ languages supported on the platform ensures a smooth candidate coding experience. The Vaticle team found the 16,000+ question library to be well-designed and the fact that it lets the test creator pick and choose the test cases that needs to be shown to the candidate ensured that they gave a best-in-class developer experience to every applicant.

From a recruiter POV, the insight-rich reports that showcase scores like reliability score and cyclomatic complexity score helps in the in-depth reviewing of the candidate’s code.

The team was also happy at how effortlessly they could create their own question library and add questions to it. Given that they needed to create questions specifically for their line of work and of the required difficulty level and languages, it was easy to standardize the questions for a particular job role.

Outcome and next steps

For an engineering first company that focuses on software engineers, hires software engineers, and has reviews done by software engineers, HackerEarth was perfect and exactly what we had been looking for.

Haikal Pribadi,
Founder and CEO
Vaticle

The Vaticle recruitment team is satisfied with the experience and continues to scale and build their technical team using HackerEarth Assessments.

We're extremely skilled at assessing skills