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How do you show on your resume, how good you are at your work?
You can list all the skills you have.
You can put in examples of projects completed and the role you played in making it a success.
You can put in some impressive references.
All this tells the company what you did.
Not how good you are.
How inventive, sharp or sound your thinking is.
How strong you are in your foundations.
How your experience and learnings have shaped your craft.
In the technology space today, this is a problem. The companies that are hiring are not the same as the ones hiring ten years ago. A lot more startups, in niche domains are looking for talent that wants to do better work. On the other side there are 10x more experienced engineers. But companies have found out that experience and credentials aren’t enough when working on a new idea.
We have been working on this with a different approach.
Why not let developers showcase their strength through the medium they know best – code? And why not let one coding solution be shown to all companies? After all, you’re sending the same resume to all companies, then why not add your code to it?
This was something we already believed in when we started Geektrust and we found ready acceptance of it by companies and by over 80% of the 500 developers we spoke to. In addressing this, our main challenge was how to design coding problems that would:
- Help developers showcase their skill
- Give developers the room to structure their solution to bring out their best thinking, coding and creative skills
- Not make it a competition because real world coding is not a competition
- Standardize the code test so that developers need not write code for each company
After much trial and error, we designed 7 challenges. Each challenge is unique and constructed to bring out the best in a developer. We give feedback and let people re-submit because that’s how it works in the real world too! It’s not a competition and there are no leaderboards. The focus is not on whether the output is correct, but how you arrived at the output. We’re looking for how you approach problem solving and how you execute your solution, how you perhaps learn and improve.
Clean code matters
In the real world, clean code matters. Anyone can make their code work, but did you do it in a way that is scalable, readable, extensible, object-oriented and other things that matter on a real project? Our developers evaluate your code and give you personalized feedback. Our users find this feedback valuable in improving their skill and approach.
We believe this will help developers who really have the passion to do impactful work come forward and find inspiring work to do.
Resume follows skill
Would the companies solving the toughest problems and shaping the future today, rather hire someone with great academics and experience, but isn’t very hands on? Or the other way around? In our 4 years, we’ve found that when the starting point is code, and not resume, there is a 3x higher chance of an offer being rolled out and accepted. Shows that with code, things work out better at both ends. We believe resume is not the starting point for serious hiring. Skill is. Once skill is a match, is when it makes sense for other details to become relevant.
Your code should be your resume
Hear it from some of our users who believe in their skill and used it to go after jobs they really wanted.
Dhruv Saini
I saw a Geektrust ad and solved a coding challenge (which I love to do any day). So I did it just for fun and got a decent score. Suddenly I was getting notifications about companies wanting to contact me! So I thought why not solve some more challenges and improve my score.
The second time I submitted I got a better score and even more companies contacted me. I hadn’t heard of Voiro and many other companies. Everything went well with the companies I accepted, and I joined Voiro.
The fact that companies were contacting me, based on my score, instead of me sitting and applying to many companies was a different experience. It motivated me to solve more challenges and see how high I can go.
Anamika Awasthi
I had a great experience overall as it might be apparent from our interaction. I’ve actually recommended it to all of my friends who are job hunting. I find your platform to be a lot more succinct than other popular job hunting websites and the follow up network from your team is very admirable.
Swarup Mahapatra
Throughout my career I never had mentors reviewing my code. Thanks to your platform, I got to get my code reviewed by people in the industry who review other people’s code. It was good to get my coding skill validated. I realised being in QA really did help me be a better developer. And that I should stop all the self-doubt and go ahead and code.
Amith George
I really liked the idea of solving a coding problem and that being used as a baseline for judging your skill as a software developer for further interviews. Applying via GT feels like a much more efficient and skill-focused process. It probably took less than half the time it takes through a regular job portal, and definitely more streamlined, and efficient.
I keep recommending GT to my friends. Compared to horror stories I hear of people spending months hunting for a job through regular portals, getting bad offers, I had a very pleasant experience finding a job and that too within two weeks. GT is definitely worth a shot for them.
Preeti Sharma, Software Developer, CoffeeBeans Consulting
The first time I wrote code, I got a score of 2. I got some helpful mentoring from the reviewers and I solved and submitted again. The structure of the challenges is also great – I feel like it’s a real world problem when I sit down to solve. It’s complex, awesome – I applied random shuffling and probability and data structures to solve the problem and worked on code maintainability and other important aspects. Today my code is more flexible.
It’s not like other platforms – though the journey wasn’t easy, I found good companies. And I believe good things don’t come easy.
Malay Mehta, Software Developer, SahiPro
I spent almost 2 months searching for a good opportunity and kept getting rejected for silly reasons. Without even checking my coding ability!
This situation led me to wonder whether there is anybody out there in the industry who believes in coding? By chance I found Krishnan Nair’s post in one of the Bangalore Startup groups on Facebook. I went to the Geektrust website and for real saw some great innovation and people who believe what I believe – CODING. The journey started, I solved some of the challenges, got feedback, went for the ‘Code with Geektrust’ event, and this finally led to a Dream Job.
You know I was also amazed when I got an offer from a well-established startup. The reason was all they had was just my name, email, mobile number and code – exactly what I was looking for! They were not even interested in my university scores, truly believed in the skill I have and completed the interview process fast.
A user who goes by the name mcraz
“Thank you clair for contributing a layer to my thinking process. I’m in love with what you do. By far the best product I’ve seen in this space.”
What are your thoughts on your code being your resume? Write in to hello@geektrust.in and let us know! Or try one of our coding challenges and see how you hold the power to your job search.