Why companies are doing competitions and hackathons to hire early talent
Campus recruitment has long been the backbone of early talent acquisition, with companies visiting universities, screening graduates through aptitude tests and interviews, and then bringing them on board. Today, however, as companies want talent to not just execute but also experiment and innovate, they are supplementing their early hiring strategies with immersive internships and hackathons, says Richard Lobo, Chief People Officer, Tech Mahindra.
Complementing traditional campus hiring with event-based approaches like internships and hackathons allows companies to evaluate engineering students beyond their academic credentials. This helps not just in identifying strong problem solvers but also in building a future-ready talent pipeline.
This is in line with the rise of skill-based hiring, says Pasupathi S., COO of automated hiring platform HirePro. “Companies today want to focus on shortlisting the candidate rather than the campus.” Hence, such hackathons and coding leagues enable them to attract a wide variety of talent from across the country, ensuring much larger participation while reaching a much bigger talent pool of engineers.
Companies typically create multiple rounds of quizzes, give problem statements with varying levels of difficulty, and roll them out through events. These are open to second- or third-year students who, if they clear the rounds, get internships, while final-year students have the possibility of securing placement offers.