Hackathons are the new IT career fairs

Hackathons are events where participants have to create an application or solve a software problem in a defined time period.

BANGALORE: As IT companies look for more skilled talent to provide better value to global customers, hackathons are becoming a major recruitment tool, as also a vehicle to evaluate tech employees.

Hackathons are events where participants have to create an application or solve a software problem in a defined time period. Wipro, Amazon, Mindtree, Informatica, Accenture and Cognizant are among those running such coding challenges to hire quality software programmers. "There will come a time when we won't go to campuses to hire. We will ask people to solve a problem statement and then come to our office for interviews. The compensation will be based on the quality of skills," Wipro CEO T K Kurien told TOI.

Wipro also partnered with coding platform HackerEarth to run a week-long coding challenge in June for its employees. The initiative, which involved eight challenges with different levels of complexity, saw over 4,000 employee registrations from across 22 countries. "We intend to do one hackathon every month. You realize people's competency once you go through a hackathon. You find that competency sometimes doesn't reside at the top of the pyramid; it lies right at the bottom," Kurien said.

Gone are the days when companies would advertise for armies of Java or C++ programmers on job portals or newspapers. Employee referrals, too, might take a backseat. As new technologies like cloud, analytics and mobility take centrestage, firms are willing to pay a premium to hire programmers with niche skills like CoffeeScript, Knockout, Responsive Design and Bootstrap, after putting them through a live grind.

Ravi Gururaj, chairman of the Nasscom Product Council, said hackathons can help assessment of a range of attributes - ability to perform under time constraints, an engineer's versatility when pushed into unfamiliar "out-of-the-box" and "on-your-feet" scenarios. "It can also provide good clues on design sensibilities, presentation skills and team collaboration ability of the engineer," he said.





Sanat Rao of the software product think thank iSpirt , noted that in Silicon Valley, the bar for computer science is very high and companies such as Google and Yahoo are focused on testing the fundamentals in their hiring process. "For such companies, hackathons are the new career fairs," he said.

Amazon in India runs a Speed Geeking contest across premier technology institutions like National Institutes of Technology (NITs) where students have to solve five coding cases in 30-45 minutes. The winners get pre-placement interviews with Amazon. Last year, around 2,000 students across six NITs participated in the coding contest, following which Amazon conducted 15 pre-placement interviews and hired five people.

READ ALSO: Microsoft kickstarts global 'one-week hackathon' for employees

Amazon also runs an annual internal hackathon called Srujan that is open to employees across Amazon Web Services, Kindle and Amazon Retail. Employees are given real-life problems to work on and have to come up with solutions. The winners would work on implementing the big idea.

A number of coding platforms like Techgig, HackerEarth and HackerRank run coding challenges to ease the process of talent discovery for companies. Avnish Anand, product head in coding platform Techgig.com, said, "If you want to go in for mass hiring, you can deploy an army of tele-callers to get the job done. But if you want to hire the best coders, hackathons give you a cost-efficient discovery channel to get best-of-breed talent."

Sachin Gupta, co-founder of HackerEarth, said hackathons reduce the time to market and make the initial screening process easy for companies. "In a traditional model, a company will have to screen 90 people to get the top 15 and then shortlist the top five candidates. Hackathons cost half of what HR recruiters charge from companies, which is between 8.5% and 15% of the CTC (cost to company)," he said
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