Why is ChallengeRocket your place to recruit tech talents?
Recruiting the right tech talent is no easy feat. Today’s industry is competitive, so ensuring your recruitment process works is essential. Yet, there’s only so much you can tell by looking at a stack of CV’s.
A better solution, then, is to create a means of recruitment that lets specialists showcase their own skills in an environment that encourages them to demonstrate their abilities — and this is where ChallengeRocket comes in.
Our goal is simple: we use hackathons and skill based challenges to help companies find the right tech talent for their business. We provide organisations with an entirely new way to find, assess and filter tech-based candidates. Through this, you can recruit various positions, not just developers. So, if you’re looking to hire a coder, developer or anyone else with tech talent, why is our approach so much more effective?
A recruitment process that assesses everyone
In the traditional recruitment model, you would assess CVs and interview selected candidates, filtering down to your final selections. It is only at these later stages that most organisations would consider some form of physical test — a live exercise to see how the developer performs when faced with a challenge. This is completely understandable, as such assessments take time and energy. But what if there was an effective way to do this right at the start? Doing so better enables you to better assess candidates as a better, earlier level. Our approach isn’t about quickly cutting down a pile of applicants, it’s about finding true diamonds that otherwise wouldn’t even apply.
It takes a developer to know a developer
Let’s start with a very simple fact: the best developer recruitment process needs people who are familiar with developers and their corner of the industry. In other words, the best developers can be found by other developers, not generic recruitment staff who work across a variety of sectors. As the old saying goes: jack of all trades, master of none. Aside from specialised headhunters, how much can a job agency understand about the specifics of the IT industry?
We, on the other hand, are all developers and passionate people within the industry. Why does this matter? When clients come to us with their needs, we intuitively understand who they are looking for and what they are seeking to accomplish. Also, we know how to create hackathons that are the most attractive offer out there, drawing in the very best.
In the worlds of CEO, Paweł Kwiatkowski: “ChallengeRocket is very much by developers, for developers. If you’ve ever used a private HR company and had to spend time explaining your needs and struggling to find the right candidates, we completely understand your frustration. Our approach goes another way. We focused on the results we wanted and worked backward to create the ideal path to this solution — and it works.”
Prove the tech talents first
Similarly, finding someone with the right skills and knowledge is vital, so why do we save these factors until the very end? Our hackathon and coding challenges instantly highlight the areas that matter. You can see how developers handle a difficult task, how they find creative solutions and, ultimately, you can see the final code or project produced in a given amount of time. When specifically searching for people you can trust to write, review and solve problems, these are the factors that matter. By filtering this way — before conducting more formal interviews and hiring processes — we ensure that everyone you deal with has demonstrated a key level of capability. If you’re looking to hire someone to meet your technical requirements, this is the one area that cannot be compromised, so we strive to ascertain these qualities as early on as possible.
Discover hidden tech talents
We know the best way to find recruit a developer or coder is to let them work their magic. Our hackathon processes are designed to let these tech talents prove themselves naturally. The competitive and technological nature of the challenge attracts those with an active interest and a desire to succeed — many of which might not apply to a traditional job posting. Why? Posting on job boards simply doesn’t work like it used to. Regardless of the industry, only 12% of recruiters operating this way are able to fill even half of their staff gaps. In the IT sector, this becomes even more clear. Jobs all sound very similar. Most posts get ignored by your target audience, because there’s no real incentive for them at all. Even then, developers often work full-time, or freelance, in similar positions — it’s very difficult to assess someone’s true skills and potential from a job title.
Online challenges, however, are something new. They offer numerous benefits that instantly intrigue and engage. Furthermore, there are many qualities that can be better assessed during demonstrations. If you host a team-based hackathon, you can see how well individuals react when placed into teams. While these might seem like soft skills, they nonetheless reflect factors that may be vital for your intended needs, such as code reviews and cross-department collaboration.
Just ask Tomasz Florczak, our CTO: “Developers have numerous talents that don’t come out during old fashioned interviews. Do you want to see how well developers can code or work with problems? Put them in real world situations. Make it fun, and they will show their true potential without even being aware of it. That’s how you find tech talent.”
As an added note, it’s worth nothing that over 80% of candidates lie during interviews. A real challenge offers real results that can’t be faked or simulated. If someone has hidden tech talents, the right hackathon or online event will clearly demonstrate them.
Access to our community
As dedicated experts in hackathons, we’ve made a name for ourselves not just with employers, but also with developers and tech specialists as well. If you’re looking to hire a coder, why not choose a recruitment partner that has spent years establishing a growing community of such specialists? Our company is known for our hackathons and we regularly promote our own upcoming events. In short, we’ve got a strong following of our own, so why not take advantage of that? By tapping into our community, you give your recruitment efforts an instant boost.
Save time & effort
Individual assessments take a lot of time. It stands to measure, then, that interviewing and testing larger groups of people will only scale up this issue. According to a LinkedIn survey, over a third of hiring specialists feel the traditional method takes too long. Our hackathons, however, provide an effective way for testing and assessing en masse, removing much of this roadblockage.
This is further supported by our automated assessment tools, which take the hard work out of the post-challenge process. We automatically offer reports and insights into each developers performance, further enabling quick filtering and selective processes. Not only does our AI system offer detailed results, they are also completely unbiased, ranking candidates on pure technical merit alone. Considering that, in the aforementioned survey, 42% of specialists stated that interview bias is a problem, starting things off with a clean, fair filtering system ensures anyone who makes it to the later stages is someone worth getting to know.
The best assessment software
Furthermore, speaking of assessment tools, we’ve gone out of our way to provide the best possible software. Our solution readily integrates with the hackathon results, giving you readable information that cuts to the core of each applicant’s skills and performance. We regularly host coding tasks and challenges on our platform, in addition to custom events tailored for our client’s specific needs, which gives a breakdown of the final results to the recruiter. This in-depth analysis offers charts and other data visualisation elements to break down each task or section, so you can truly see who shines in which areas. This is something we’ve spent a lot of time developing, purely for the development and technology industry, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by others. Facebook for Developers considers us to be the world’s best solution when it comes to assessing software developers and engineers on their technical skills.
We’re trusted around the world
When you create a recruitment solution for a specific industry, you become highly effective in targeting the needs of that particular sector. As a result, we’ve stood out from traditional recruitment platforms and ChallengeRocket is trusted by brands around the world.
We’ve worked with the likes of IBM, NVIDIA, Santander and more. In fact, our recent NIVIDIA Jetson™ Developer Challenge event saw 2370 people submit 114 projects in the realm of AI and robotics, with entrants from 80 countries. Not only do such large enterprises trust us — specialists and passionate developers in the community flock to our events as well. In each of these contests, people came together to create new solutions and share forward-thinking ideas. For many people in the community, this is what our unique events represent: the opportunity to shine and contribute new ideas and developments.
Furthermore,we can run online code challenges that enable people to take part from wherever they are, while hackathons motivate and encourage people much more than a job interview, drawing in people who normally wouldn’t make the trip for ‘just’ an interview. It’s how we helped Mercari hosted their first Euro Hack this year — and 500 people from 53 different countries participated. When did a typical job advert grab such diverse interest?
Strong Employer Branding
If you’re regularly looking for passionate, experienced tech specialists, it helps to have a brand that’s strongly associated with similar beliefs. After all, there’s a reason coders, developers and engineers want to work somewhere — your recruitment process needs to highlight this attitude. As a company, these challenges enable you to present yourself to the wider tech community, creating buzz that spreads to markets and locations you might not have previously reached. This is why we believe so much in hackathons. When your name becomes synonymous with interesting hackathons, fun events and a strong engagement with the coding community, your developer recruitment is much more successful. Why? Because people want to work with you and are actively seeking your events out. The benefits don’t stop there, however.
Online events and hackathons create an exceptionally positive experience, as we’ve demonstrated here. In turn, it’s well known this has an overwhelming impact on how candidates view your brand, even if they aren’t selected. Most people will refer your company to others, while positive experiences during these events will often also make their way onto social networks. This is essentially free exposure that your business can capitalise in, pushing itself as a positive, passionate brand that tech people want to work for.
Publicise your innovation
If that’s not enough, it’s worth noting that a hackathon can do much more than hire a coder or fill open tech positions. Hackathons themselves are fun events that encourage experts to innovate, experiment and create. The end result of this is a large swathe of new ideas, concepts and demos. All of this is excellent material to showcase to the public. You could, for example, host a hackathon to meet a challenging need in your niche sector, utilising the results to push your own company ahead as an industry leader.
Furthermore, you’ve also gathered a wealth of ideas, prototypes and demos that can be utilised within your own company. Thanks to hackathons, you can get key ideas for new commercial products or solutions. This, combined with the previously mentioned brand benefits, all helps make your company more tech-friendly and appealing to the very specialists you’re seeking to attract.
How to get started?
Ultimately, while it saves time, effort and removes a lengthy recruitment process, hackathons still require some hard work in their own right. If you’re a veteran of the industry and have held numerous events before, this shouldn’t be a problem. However, if you’re unsure of how to get the best possible results, we’re here to help. ChallengeRocket can plan, arrange, host and organise hackathon challenges on your behalf. While we’re working diligently on this, all you have to do is tell us about your company and its staff needs. When we’re done, you can simply view and asses the final results through our automation tools, before deciding how to move forward.
Whether you’re looking to hire one developer or a hundred, our recruitment model is purpose designed to uniquely meet your industry’s needs. If you’re interested in dynamically innovating how you find your next team member — and how they find you — let’s get started!
