Hiring at hackathons

Hiring smart developers at Hackathons- the Do’s & Dont’s

This Friday, I spent my day at my first hackathon of this year- the 50p Hacknight.

We had a wonderful bunch of developers, designers and people interested in the knowing more about the payments ecosystem. The event was at Razorpay office and we started at around 7 PM on Friday and wrapped up at 1 PM on Saturday. It was wonderful to have mentors from Razorpay, Unocoin & Coinsecure mentoring the participants, and of course, giving them swags.

During the introduction, one of the attendees said that they came for the event to hire people. This was pretty interesting. No- not the ‘coming for a hackathon to hire people’ bit, but the way he said it. The hacknight had a lot of amazing things happening around, but I’m just gonna write about this bit.

Types of Hackathons

I’ve been to various hackathons, interacted with developers, designers and a whole bunch of very talented people. According to me, these are some categories of hackathons-

• Hiring hackathons- In these, the participants are already aware that companies would approach them and the entire event sort of acts like an interview.
• Problem Statement- In these, the participants are usually given a problem statement and are asked to develop and design a solution to overcome the challenge.
• Broad topic- In these, you are given a domain, for example payments, or IoT and are asked to develop projects on that.

So, are the participants who come for these different?

Well, it’s mostly their motivations. The first category is driven by the fact that they would get a job offer if they perform well. The second and third category has ‘solving a problem’ or ‘building and working on interesting ideas’ as their priority.

Hiring pitches

Here’s a hiring 101- Unless you’re at the first kind of hackathon, avoid making outright hiring pitches to participants. It irks them!

Everyone’s looking for talent and hackathons are usually a place to find an amazing bunch of talented individuals. You also have a lot of time and assess their technical skills. As lucrative as this sounds, stop poaching people!

So what is a good hiring pitch-

1. Talk the participants. Interact well enough to know more about their ideas, technical implementation and share what you’re working on. If you’re genuinely interested in their project, ask questions. If you’d like to get their eyes on your project, don’t hesitate to ask.
2. Now that you know each other, share some information on where you work and what organization you’re with.
3. If (and only if the person) shows interest in the work you do and/or in the organization you work with, let them know that you’re interested in catching up later that week post the hacknight or invite them to your office for coffee.
4. If they don’t show interest, it’s probably because they aren’t interested.

‘Don’t’s of hiring at a Hackathon

Boy, this is a long list, but I’m just going to add stuff.

1. It’s not a good idea to announce during the introductions that you’re at the event to hire
2. Don’t send HR folks for a tech hiring hackathon. This is a no-brainer. Even if you’re there to hire, do it subtly- no matter what your marketing team asks you to do. If you are developers/managers coming from companies wanting to hire talents, it’s advised that you participate and work on projects at the hackathon.
3. Stop telling developers to ‘focus on common man’s problems’ unless you’re a judge or mentor. Let them do what they want. Give your opinions when asked for.
4. Stop going around and getting everyone’s email id/phone number in case they are not comfortable sharing it. Also give them a valid reason to share it with you- “Hey, we’re from x company..we’re working on y technology and since you’ve been working on this for quite sometime, we’d love to connect with you to learn more.”
5. Stop having unwanted conversations about unrelated stuff if they’re not interested. If you have nothing good to say, it’s good to not say anything.

If you have any experience on hiring during hackathons, do let me know. If the payments ecosystem excites you, you should definitely attend 50p.in

This blog is a part of my “One Blog Per Week” resolution. Contains random rambling, learning and experience. If you have any inputs/thoughts, shout out to me at @dun3buggi3.