[Culture Series] Enter the Developer's Den with Interview Street

This article is a part of the Culture Series we are carrying as a run up to the Startup Jobs Fair, India’s first exclusive campaign to connect the most promising talent with the most exciting startups. This series will bring out the culture of some of the most dynamic startups that have managed to scale and make a mark. Here, we cover InterviewStreet...

Entry level hiring for any company proves out to be a daunting task: the startups face a scarcity of quality while the larger ones are flooded with tons on applications many of which lie below par. Interview Street not only solves the problem for the high tech companies but also makes sure the talented candidates do not roam about in search of job positions. A Morpheus Gang company that went onto raise money from YCombinator, InterviewStreet is one of the tech product success stories from India.

Founded in 2009 by Vivek Ravisankar and Harishankaran Karunanidhi, Interview Street creates customized programming tests (in different programming language) to evaluate candidates. Branching out the idea, HackerRank was born in 2011 which is an online community for hackers. This social platform for hackers encourages them to solve puzzles and code game bots in different domains. “We started HackerRank as an experiment to see if we could build a community of problem solvers and it's building up really well,” shares Vivek.

The current team stands at 17 with ten on HackerRank while seven on the InterviewStreet product. In our conversation, Vivek passionately mentions how their revenues have been doubling every month and the last seven months have seen over 120k hackers engaging with their products.

A culture for the hackers

Interview Street is a place for the uber geek. Picking very carefully, InterviewStreet has built a team of hard-core coders who are obsessed with the idea. Vivek confesses of being little scared at start, but gaining knowledge about the market and relying on data points to build on, their hard work has payed off. “Our attitude and hard-working nature haven't changed during this interim," he says.

"While Interviewstreet is being built as the only software a company would ever need for technical recruiting, HackerRank is the talent pool. In essence our company has the potential to completely disrupt the software industry (not just recruiting)," says Vivek.

And for building on this vision, InterviewStreet has hired people who're coders at hear.

The culture at InterviewStreet is quite flexible where any member is allowed to intervene if the founders end up in taking a reckless decision. The folks at the startup are work addictive with a vision to build something great. “We're really proud of the team that's built now - stunned by their obsession towards work.” The founders are richly inspired from the cultures of tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple. There is randomness and chaos at times but these are equally lined up with few disciplinary levels. The boundaries are rewritten everyday with an effort to build something engaging.

InterviewStreet priorities the work ahead of the location so, you are welcomed to work from Maldives provided you push in right set of codes. Employees enjoy the flexible working hours with other additional perks from the day of hire.

The vision ahead

The investor support has added fuel to the startup, they recently move into their new office space with cool hacker tools on board. A new product from the InterviewStreet is about to be launched which will get deeper benefits for companies in recruiting talent. They are also looking forward for some great minds to join their rich talent pool in HackerRank.

InterviewStreet is hiring at Startup Jobs Fair, come be a part of it!