HYDERABAD: Call it influence of the West or just an evolution in the recruitment process, the job recruitment scene, which is mostly dependent on traditional fairs, is now seeing a stiff competition from the ‘hackathons’.
Be it a fresher, experienced techie or a multinational company looking to hire the right candidates, hackathons seem to be solving everyone’s problem as it provides a great platform to reach the best in the business. According to recruiters, curriculum vitae (CV) gives only an overview of the candidates skills while hackathons provide a platform to test the skill. As part of hackathon, sessions are held to test the candidate’s skills and experience to shoulder job-related challenges.
Giving an insight into the role of hackathons in the recruitment process, Rajeev Lulla, CEO of Askfunding and Askmentor.com, said it helps to find the right candidate.
“This is a very healthy trend in the industry. Both, industry and job seekers find it tough to get a right candidate or job. Hackathons are the best way and they are going to cut down the interview time by half. We generally see people losing out because of their poor communication skills. Having hackathons as a preliminary round will solve this problem,” he opined.
He brushed aside worries over whether freshers will lose out the opportunities in this process. “Unless, both the experienced candidates and freshers are grouped in the same category, freshers won’t be at the receiving end. And, I think it won’t be a problem for them as many freshers are good at coding,” said Lulla.
A hackathon is an event where computer programmers and others involved in software and hardware development collaborate to develop a usable software. The session has now become an ideal hunting ground for companies looking to hire top talent.
Naren Krishna, founder of stockroom.co, the company which conducts hackathons for its clients to hire talent, said “We are a four-month-old company and have some 20 plus clients. Although, the concept is new to India, it is a great platform where the real talent can be identified. In this short span, we have placed more than 30 candidates in top MNCs through hackathons.”
Asserting that hackathons are the future of recruitment process, Naren claimed that it will ensure fair recruitment.
“It’s not true that only startups are interested in hiring people through hackathon as most of our clients are MNCs. Hackathons are mostly used by product-based companies. It may take some more time for service-based companies to venture into this territory, but surely they will follow the trend. Definitely, in future hackathons will replace the traditional fair and one positive outcome is that it would eliminate bias in recruiting and recommendations,” he added.
A Naga Alekhya, a BTech student hailed hackathon as a welcome change. “This is a welcome change in the recruitment process as the major thing we concentrate on in the college is coding. In interviews, though we have all the required technical knowledge, many of us lose out because of other reasons. At least, these hackathons give us an opportunity to demonstrate our skills,” she said. At a time when hackathons are entering the mainstream changing the recruitment process, many in the industry are not all that enthusiastic about it. “A software isn’t built in a day or two. So, judging a candidate just by a hackathon isn’t always fair,” Ram Babu, who has been in the field for a long time or so, said.