CodeEval: Helping Startups Find Developers Through Programming Challenges

Monika Jansen Jun 3, 2012 Tweet

If you’re growing your startup and looking to hire developers, I am willing to bet that you are struggling to find qualified and high-quality developers – preferably ones that that don’t require you to raise another angel round to afford.  Likewise, if you’re a developer looking for a challenging gig, going through recruiters can be extremely frustrating.

CodeEval was developed to help both sides of the table. Co-founder William Hsu explained,

“Our product automates the screening process for developers through coding challenges. In addition we have a community of over 10,000 developers actively looking for new opportunities.”

For employers, CodeEval provides an effective platform to identify promising candidates from a crowd of applicants through the aforementioned coding challenges. Developers can solve those challenges for a job, fun or fame, all the while competing with their peers.

The idea was developed when Hsu’ co-founder Jimmy John move to the Bay Area and had a horrible experience dealing with recruiters.  So far, their solution is working really well: “One of our clients Milo.com (now part of eBay) had a challenge running for a couple months with over 800+ code submissions and only a 7.8% pass rate. They ended up hiring 2 candidates and saved hundreds of hours searching and screening talent.”

So far they’ve placed a few dozen candidates, and well over 1,000+ companies ha e used their free technical assessment tool. “There’s a lively discussion on Quora from some of the people who’ve gotten their current jobs through CodeEval,” Hsu said.

But they’re not stopping at just recruiting – the team has much bigger plans.  “We view recruiting as only one element of what we actually want to accomplish. As we’ve discovered, there’s simply not a lot enough talent available and although we’re certainly streamlining recruiting, we want to actually be out there creating the talent.

“We already have many of our users coming in from Codecademy, Treehouse, Lynda, etc. to practice their coding skills on our platform. Our long term vision is to create a community where people can come to learn coding for free, practice, compete, and potentially get placed into their dream job.“

CodeEval was a showcased startup at last week’s Tech Cocktail San Francisco mixer.