If you’re under an impression that Hackathon is only for technology geeks, then its time you consider this thought again. Recruiting is now picking up pace to sync with IT industry and organise challenges for HR managers to find the best talent. As the recruiting industry gets increasingly competitive for hiring managers, so do the innovative ways make inroads into the workplace culture to influence transformation.
It doesn’t matter which industry you belong to, hackathons are a fun way of getting team together on a challenging project. With the ongoing war for talent, recruitment is indeed a fun exploration for hiring managers, who are walking the thin rope to meet budgets and bridge the skills gap in an organisation.
To address this challenging environment in which recruitment specialists across industries thrive in, Flipkart and LinkedIn came up with an interesting initiative last year, to organise the first recruiting hackathon in Bengaluru, India. This idea might seem quite intriguing to many hiring managers and professionals alike, with some seeing bleak ray of hope to resolve their recruitment worries. Let’s understand what this recruiting hackathon (Recruitathon) had to offer for the HR professionals.
This hackathon was initiated to meet 3 core business objectives. They are:
See: 5 Recruitment Hacks You Can Implement Immediately
To make this event a huge success, the team at Flipkart also put up a cross-functional team for the Hackathon comprising of four senior HR leaders, hiring managers, IT managers and 25 recruiters along with a team of 6 from LinkedIn to put up the event. The sourcing marathon conducted during the event generated a pipeline of over 200 qualified candidates within just four hours (this ideally takes weeks or months for large organizations).
To formulate talent pipelining strategies, the team of recruiters and IT managers built recruiting strategies to hire and engage top talent pool in the country. The candidates were engaged through frequent online conversations with emphasis being laid on creating a strong employer brand such as to attract talent to be a part of the team.
LinkedIn Recruiter advertised the advantages of the platform to source candidates for open positions. During this interactive section, 224 Candidates were sourced and validated across different roles at Flipkart.
This recruiting hackathon organised by Flipkart showed 91 percent acceptance rate by touching upon both strategic and transactional areas of recruiting. 80 percent of the profiles have already been shortlisted by hiring managers for interviews.
Few key recommendations for hiring managers from this hackathon was focused on addressing issues such as – ensuring faster responses to interview scheduling, creation of an interview process management tool and a lot more of such plans were discussed at this recruitment event. Long-term recruitment strategies could involve running across a unified search across multiple platform such as social media channels, job boards and ATS.
Apart from the recruitment drive, the team also brainstormed on some radical hack ideas for enabling smoother recruitment processes. Seven hacks were generated during the event, out of which three have already been moved to the incubation mode for the upcoming quarter.
This is quite an innovative approach and fun way to kickstart recruitment off-track with a social media hackathon. Well folks, when are you planning to organise one?
Also read: 5 Warning Signs your recruitment strategy is not working
