December 11th, 2018
While working for a large e-commerce company in Asia, Peter Karakas was responsible for screening and interviewing candidates for software development roles. But he struggled to find really strong, qualified candidates.
Then Peter had an idea. Instead of sifting through resumes, he decided to start searching through the digital footprints of sites like Github and Stack Overflow in order to identify and reach out to strong developers. He found it was a much better indicator of their level of ability than their CVs.
- Founded in 2018
- 8 team members
- Employees in Hungary, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Bangladesh
- Over 120,000 coders ranked
- Site: CodersRank
When Peter realized he had discovered something that could become a business, he moved back to his home country of Hungary and started to automate his process for scoring developers. Soon after that, he founded CodersRank within the Innonic Group’s Startup Studio. Since its founding, CodersRank has scaled to 8 employees, located all across the globe.
Once he added people to his team, Peter recognized that because of their distributed nature, standups were a real struggle. He knew having a daily standup meeting was critical for sharing information and staying in sync, but because of their time zone differences, some team members simply couldn’t attend.
The team decided to start using a shared Google doc to record their answers to the three standup questions:
- What did you accomplish yesterday?
- What are your goals for today?
- Are any obstacles impeding your progress?
The Google doc worked well for a while, but the team started to experience challenges. “The doc started to grow, it was slow to open and hard to search and we had to remind the team members to fill it out. So we started to search for a better solution.”
Peter searched on Google and came across Status Hero. He started a free trial and began testing it out with his team. They quickly adopted the tool and started to see immediate results. Participation increased and it was much easier to use than the Google doc.
One of the big challenges Peter had with the Google doc was searching and finding important information. But with Status Hero, he doesn’t have that problem. “Now it is much easier to find important information and the data is more organized.”
Another shortcoming of the Google doc was that Peter had to remind his team to fill it out. Now, using the Status Hero Slack integration has made it quick and easy for Peter’s team to give their update - no more nagging from Peter required. “Thanks to the auto reminder we almost never forget to check in.”
In addition to addressing the shortcomings of Google docs, Peter’s team has seen other benefits. They enabled the integrations with Jira and Github, which add detail and context automatically to each update. Instead of having to write in the Google doc about which stories they updated, that information is automatically included with their updates.
But the biggest benefits that Peter and team have found (and one that we think everyone would like for their team) is a more efficient standup.
“Our standups are more focused and we reduced the time by 50%.”
