Cisco partnered with HackerRank to run a 2.5 day CodeSprint that pulled over 6,500 engineers and surfaced the best software and security talent in the world.
Cisco builds the highways of the Internet. Its engineering and security team is among the best in the world, supporting the core infrastructure of the web billions of people rely on each day. It’s on a mission to shape the future of the Internet through software, hardware and other network services.
When you’re at the forefront of technology with a high bar for passion, talent and cultural fit, traditional methods of recruiting just won’t cut it. In order to attract innovative programmers to help achieve this mission, Cisco’s recruiting team needed an equally innovative strategy to spot the highest skilled talent.
Cisco partnered with HackerRank to host two simultaneous CodeSprints (online hackathons) aimed at attracting top engineers with talent, skill, and an entrepreneurial spirit. The CodeSprint competitions also created a new way for Cisco recruitment leaders to fill one of their most difficult and elusive positions–security specialist engineer. By hosting a special competition exclusively for security specialists, the Cisco team was not only able to attract thousands of skilled engineers, but also see their creativity, problem solving and teamwork abilities on display. No need to rely on LinkedIn, job boards, or referrals–the Cisco team was finding new talent in a way traditional recruiting never could.
In the span of 2 and a half days, nearly 5,000 engineers came to the CodeSprint for a chance to win top honors in the general Cisco Software Challenge — another 1,700 engineers competed in the Cisco Security Challenge. Each challenge consisted of 5 problems tailored to match Cisco’s desired skillset. Most importantly,, almost all of the competitors expressed a clear interest in working for Cisco. To sweeten the deal, the top-ranking competitors also won prizes such as MacBook Pros, GoPro Hero4s or a Cisco t-shirt.
Based on the average challenge success rate in the graph above, you can see just how challenging the security problems were in comparison to their software counterparts. For the Security Challenge problems, the success rate for each problem followed the logical trajectory — the easier ones were achieved more often than the harder problems. But the Software Challenge problems yielded a slightly surprising result: The moderate “Big Table” problem was harder for folks to finish than the difficult “Largest Palindromic Substring.”
You can see the Software Challenge problems here: [P1, P2, P3, P4, P5] and the Security Challenge problems here: [P1, P2, P3, P4, P5]. The Security Challenge competitors demonstrated a high level of skill and mastery.
Interestingly enough, although the Cisco Security Challenge problem-set was much more challenging with a lower rate of average success, there were many more winners with perfect scores than software engineers. In other words, the Security Challenge competitors were extremely qualified and skilled at their specialization.
