What is hackathon and why it's so appealing

What is hackathon and why it's so appealing

Autor: Ania Wilczak

Are you small IT company looking for a way to expand? Do you want to find the best persons to start working for you? Real hard-working programmers with the skills and ability to work under pressure. Good idea is to organize or participate in hackathon. But what are the best hackathon ideas?

What is hackathon.

The whole hackathon ideas has started back in the 90’, when small group of computer enthusiast stayed whole night and days writing code and trying to invent something new. To be frank, in the beginning it was mainly hacking. Yeah, nineties was a pretty crazy time for everyone. Nevertheless, that’s how the whole thing came to be. With few freaks that really loved computers.
But in one moment the idea of sitting whole night with bunch of people and try to create something new as soon as possible with the little resources they have started to blast through the mainstream. Along with the popularization of the personal computers and after that internet, more and more people started to learn to code. Constantly growing demand of IT specialists created new job markets and opened opportunities for thousands of people to work in this sector. With these changes, hackathons gain more and more popularity.
Hackathons are not only for coders and programmers. Format of one, two day marathons of sparking creativity have fallen on a sympathetic ear. Nowadays brands and companies are organizing such events in every niche. Starting with law or sociological problems and ending on fashion. Without even one line of code written.

People see — people remember

So, we have this little bit geeky event for the most engaged audience. Willing to spend one or two days without a shower and eating take-outs just to be part of this. Against all odds being sponsored of event like that or more, hosting one yourself can be huge boost of the good PR for your company. First of all, it shows that you are up to date and want to encourage the best values of your employees. Nothing is more important to your programmer than being convicted that someone out there on the top of corporate ladder cares. Cares and gives opportunity to do fun things.

On company end, it’s the best moment to engage your HR department. Keeping in mind, that event you are hosting is not internal and specialists and enthusiasts from other places can sign in and participate in hackathon as well. Now, on your very eyes you can observe and draw conclusions from the best assessment centre you can ever imagine. It’s probably the best way to perform a recrutation process. Observe working participants and at the end ask most suitable persons if they want to work for you. If they are thinking about changing the job, you have perfect candidate that you know. Both the attitude and skill level.

We can’t forget about image, that’s being hosted of hackathons create. It gives your company really good name. In-between people who actually cares and are interested. Coders, programmers and other IT related employees have their own media and their own events. Patronizing them and ensuring that your brand will be well exposed is one of the best way of advertising yourself and your company. As I said before in IT community grapevine is the best way to actually establish your public image and attract specialists.

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