Building a talented team is one of the most challenging tasks of being a founder. Recruiting, specially tech talent, is extremely hard, and the process hasn’t evolved much since the 1920’s. Dozens of startups tried to tackle the gigantic ‘recruiting’ monster, but almost all of them have failed.
Ritika Trikha is the content marketer at HackerRank, a venture-backed startup focusing on making tech hiring as easy as possible. She leads, writes and edits HackerRank’s blog and handles all social media campaigns.
Ritika is extremely experienced in social media content marketing her work has been featured in US News & World Report, Mashable, Business Insider and a number of other professional publications around the web. That’s why she knows that, as the recruiting space is extremely competitive (think Workable, Toptal, HuntClub, and many more!) if she wants to increase readership and engagement via content, her blog posts need to stand out.
That’s when Piktochart comes in!
Using Piktochart To Improve Her Posts
As her job is to engage an audience, Ritika needs to create content on a regular basis. But this isn’t regular, plain old, content. Her audience, developers and companies, are extremely sophisticated and used to a high-level of information. Just take a look at some of her recents posts:
The Risky Eclipse Of Statisticians
The Inevitable Return of COBOL
The Interdependency of Stanford & Silicon Valley
Well, for such fantastic pieces to come to life, it all starts with data. Before even writing the first paragraph, Ritika researches interesting data on the topic: “Half the time, I get data for posts & infographics from original sources (from the company itself), and the other half from other places”.
After that, Ritika proceeds to writing the actual content. As her audience is sophisticated, she needs to make the most of the research she previously did. The end result is, usually, a 2,000-word, super polished and interesting post.
Finally, once the contest is drafted, revised and edit, she adds the visual layer. As her posts are data-rich, she uses Piktochart to improve readability, and make it more friendly and shareable for social media. “All the templates make it really easy”, she comments.
The visual layer consists of a whole range of different elements: images, icons, timelines, banners, graphs and even full infographics and Ritika uses Piktochart for almost everything: designing images, pulling up individual icons and creating graphs. “One thing on Piktochart I couldn’t live without is the graphs tool. My blog posts are super data-rich, so that tool is super useful to me!”, explains Ritika.
On July 20, 2015, she published The Risky Eclipse of Statisticians. Its a fantastic post depicting the transition from regular, old fashioned statisticians to new, tech-savy data scientists. For that post, she used Piktochart to create a few visuals, including this one:
Another example is her post Cisco’s CodeSprint Pioneered a New Way to Attract Software & Security Innovators. For this piece, Ritika used her beloved graph tool to illustrate Cisco’s challenge success rate, perfect scores, demographics and more.
A Few Recommendations For Beginners
What’s more impressive about Ritika is the fact that she has no previous graphic design knowledge, or any formal training.
How did she learn? According to her, “it’s about going with her gut, deciding what looks best, seeing and getting inspiration from other blogs, and Piktochart”.
We’ve built Piktochart from the ground up to be the perfect tool for first-timers, so don’t be afraid to try it out!
