lowe's hiring challenge hacker earth

Introduction：

Professional Hire ♂

　　Hiring professional talent is a much different process than entry-level and mid-level talent. These individuals have between 5-8 years of professional experience. Professional or Senior level talent is often a more passive candidate. In many cases, they are sourced through a referral internally. Additionally, many senior-level individuals are already employed and you will find that there are fewer candidates.

　　The below visual shows a typical, senior-level hiring process flow. In the following sections, we will go over key differences in hiring this level of talent.

　　When planning to hire senior-level talent, the process will need to be more collaborative. It’s important that you get everyone on the same page about what the process will look like.

　　Decide as a team:

　　What experience level are you looking for? Sr. Manager, Lead, Director, VP, etc.

　　Do they need to have strong domain experience and knowledge?

　　What ideal personality traits would be a good culture fit for the team

　　Will this be a panel-style interview?

　　What is the review process for making a decision?

　　Many times a senior-level candidate will never receive a test. This will need to be decided upfront and may vary from candidate to candidate and from role to role.

　　Whereas early-talent and mid-level candidates will be given a multiple-choice or real-world project, as mentioned above Senior-level talent will not. Typically, the best practice during the screening phase will simply be a phone discussion with the hiring manager. Since they are most likely sourced or referred there may need to be less upfront validation. Experience speaks for itself. This is also a great opportunity for the hiring manager to SELL your company and team to the candidate.

　　Use this time with the candidate to talk about:

　　The candidate’s experience.

　　What are some projects that they were excited to work on?

　　What made the project successful?

　　What kind of projects would they like to work on in the future?

　　Innovative projects that the company is working on.

　　How will this role impact that project?

　　This screening is a chance for you to get a feel for the candidate and their interest. If there is a mutual interest, now is a good time to let them know that they will be invited to a virtual onsite interview. Set the expectations with them of what they can expect for the in-person interview.

　　Before the interview, get the interview panel together again to re-align on the in-person interview.

　　The interview phase will typically include a few interviewers. The beginning of the interview is usually the best time to ask behavioral questions to identify if the candidate is a good culture fit for the company. These questions should have been identified in the Plan phase of the hiring process.

　　The next half of the interview is more technical in nature. For a Senior-level role, you will want to avoid multiple-choice questions. The goal here is to have them showcase their problem-solving skills and their ability to build or fix a real-world application.

　　Have them showcase this by using a Whiteboard Interview question type, or have them work up an architectural Diagram within the interview.

　　Watch this short video to see how HackerRank Interview functionality can help.

　　When it comes to making a final decision on a candidate, the process will rely mostly on the importance of feedback from the interviewers and the consensus from the entire hiring team. The information that was entered into the scorecards can be used to make a final hiring decision.

Getting Started for Hiring Managers ♂

　　HackerRank is a hiring platform that helps companies seamlessly hire skilled developers in a remote-first environment. As a technical recruiter or hiring manager, you can use HackerRank's Developer Skills Platform to objectively evaluate tech talent at every stage of your company's recruiting process. Here is a guide to help you get started with the HackerRank platform.

　　The Developer skills Platform is designed around four core components of the hiring process that will help you hire the right candidate for a job role.

　　Plan

　　Screen

　　Interview

　　Rank

　　Planning is critical in any hiring process and in the remote first work environment, a proper hiring plan has become more important than ever. Whether you are hiring recent university grads or experienced professionals, you can use our platform to customize roles and examinations to meet your specific hiring needs and effectively assess the right skills for the job thus experiencing an excellent candidate hiring experience.

　　The Roles Management module in the HackerRank for Work platform is designed to give more control and structure to the hiring process. The HackerRank Skills Directory hosts a set of skills along with key competencies based on Industry standards vetted by the HackerRank Skills Advisory Council. You can create Roles and map them to specific skills that meet the requirements for the Role.

　　Supporting Articles

　　Getting Started with Roles and Skills

　　How to create Custom Roles on HackerRank

　　We provide you with end-to-end screening options to accelerate your hiring process and save time wasted in reviewing huge volumes of resumes. The screening process involves Tests and interviews, which are discussed below in detail.

　　The HackerRank library offers you a wide range of ready-made questions with different levels of complexity across various programming languages. You can use these questions in your assessments and evaluate your candidates for a specific role. You can find these ready-to-use questions in our library under ‘HackerRank Questions’. Further, if you want to use custom questions in your tests, you can create questions from the library. Custom questions are saved in “My Company Questions” in the library.

　　You can use the filter option in the HackerRank library to easily skim through the available questions. Select the job role from the drop-down and use various filters like skills, difficulty, recommended time, owner, etc to find the right set of questions and use them in your test

　　HackerRank Library Navigation

　　As a hiring manager, you can create online assessments to assess candidates for various roles.

　　You can either create a predefined test on specific roles or create your own questions and add them to your custom tests. You can also filter tests from the test dashboard based on Labels, Owners, Roles, and Work Experience.

　　Here is a video on how to create a test in HackerRank.

　　Creating a New test

　　Supporting Article

　　Inside a test, you will get the reporting and insights features that help you gain perspective into how your Candidates are performing in their Tests and also analyze the Test efficiency in hiring the right talent. The detailed test report gives you a comprehensive view of the submitted answers, code solutions, automatically evaluated scores, test case execution statuses, logs, etc. The detailed test report also offers code quality checks and plagiarism detectors to help you classify Candidates who provide genuine solutions in your Tests.

　　You can download candidate reports in the form of PDFs or excels.

　　Test Insights

　　Viewing a Candidates Detailed Test Report

　　Downloading PDF and Excel Test Reports

　　Plagiarism Detection

　　The HackerRank Interview platform lets you conduct effective technical interviews with candidates remotely in a real-time coding environment. You can leverage a library of 2,100+ questions and schedule 1:1 or panel interviews with candidates who have passed the previous rounds of the hiring process. Here are some of the key features of HackerRank Interview.

　　Virtual Lobby: With panel interviews with candidates, it becomes essential to ensure that the participants inside the interview are not disturbed by the sudden appearance of others. The virtual lobby feature inside HackerRank Interviews helps you deal with this challenge. Learn More.

　　Built-in IDE: To support as many languages as possible and assist you with the ability to evaluate the candidate as per your job requirements, we have a user-friendly built-in IDE. This built-in IDE supports more than 40 languages.

　　Integration with Test: Import questions from the Screen stage and iterate on them together in real-time. This feature gives you an opportunity to review the code with the candidate in real-time, ask questions, and better understand the candidate’s approach to problem-solving. You can also import questions from the library or use custom questions during the interview. Learn More.

　　Recommended Questions: To make interviews seamless and efficient, we also provide Recommended Questions within the “Import Question” section which offer a set of questions specially designed for interviews and these questions usually take less than 30 mins to solve and are designed to have a quick read time (~5 mins). Learn More

　　Interviewer Scorecard: You can access the Interviewer Scorecard during an interview to manually evaluate the candidate you are interviewing. The interviewer scorecard is a private scorecard that displays a set of skills to be analyzed based on the role that the candidate is getting hired for. Learn More.

　　Virtual Whiteboard: To elevate the remote interviewing experience, a collaborative virtual whiteboard is also integrated into our interviewing platform. Learn More.

　　Interview Template: We ensure a consistent and structured interview process with no bias, by adding Interview templates. These templates assist you to set the same questions for all the candidates applying for a particular role. Learn More.

　　You can rank your candidates in HackerRank based on Code Quality, Problem Solving, Language Proficiency, and Technical Communication. Review candidate scores and integrated candidate packets across the entire hiring process. Benchmark results against your candidate pool and the HackerRank developer community to deliver even more confidence in your hiring decision.

　　HackerRank captures every touchpoint throughout the entire hiring process and presents the same in an integrated Candidate Packet that summarizes all the data on the candidate’s technical skills. It provides you with a holistic view of the candidate’s performance.

　　Inside the candidate packet, HackerRank provides you with options for benchmarking. It assists you in comparing the performance of a candidate for a specific skill against the cohort of candidates who have been assessed on the same skill sets.

1. Understand the Challenge Format

Coding Problems: 3-4 questions covering data structures, algorithms, and problem-solving.
MCQs: Topics include programming concepts, databases (SQL), OOP, and system design basics.

2. Core Topics to Focus On

Data Structures: Arrays, Strings, Trees, Graphs, Hash Tables, Stacks/Queues.
Algorithms: Sorting, Searching, Dynamic Programming, Greedy, BFS/DFS.
Problem Types: Array manipulation, string operations, graph traversal, DP (knapsack, LCS), tree problems.

3. Study Plan

Week 1: Revise Data Structures & Algorithms.
- Days 1-2: Arrays & Strings (e.g., two-sum, substring problems).
- Days 3-4: Trees & Linked Lists (BST validation, cycle detection).
- Days 5-6: Graphs (BFS/DFS, Dijkstra鈥檚 algorithm).
- Day 7: Dynamic Programming (coin change, longest increasing subsequence).
Week 2: Practice & Mock Tests.
- Solve 3-5 problems daily on HackerEarth/LeetCode (medium difficulty).
- Take timed mock tests to simulate exam conditions.

4. Key Strategies

Problem Solving:
- Read constraints carefully. Optimize for time/space complexity.
- Test edge cases (empty input, large values).
Coding:
- Use Python/Java for concise syntax. Leverage built-in libraries.
- Handle I/O efficiently (e.g., sys.stdin in Python for large inputs).
MCQs:
- Review SQL (JOINs, subqueries), OOP (polymorphism), and OS basics.