JOIN USFor the first time, taxi aggregator Ola hired three persons through a hackathon on Sunday and expressed its desire to recruit more people using such platforms.
As part of its plans to scale up activities, Ola recently announced its aim to hire fresh graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology. In addition to this, the company wanted to recruit more than 100 professionals to man various engineering and technology roles in the mobile app division — iOS, Windows and Android platforms — by March 2015.
The hackathon was conducted over two days, on February 7-8, and received as many as 1,200 registrations across the country. Participants were asked to build mobile applications in the area of transportation or mobility.
“We are considering all possible fronts so far as hiring is concerned. In this particular hackathon, we ultimately made three job offers and one offer for internship. We hope that the conversion will take place for another 10 to 15 posts,” a highly placed officer, who oversaw the entire process, told Deccan Herald on condition of anonymity.
Although bulk of hiring takes place through traditional means of campus recruitments, the officer said such platforms are time consuming and require a lot of effort. On the contrary, hackathons help companies hire the best talents suited for particular roles. “We are thinking of recruiting through hackathons at least twice in a year,” added the officer.
The hackathon was conducted by Venturesity, a peer learning and competition platform and in addition to the job offers, a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh was also part of offer. “All the three job offers and one offer for internship have been accepted by the winners. The formalities will be worked out between the candidates and the company subsequently,” said Subhendu Panigrahi, co-founder, Venturesity.
Hiring through hackathons is fairly a new phenomena and a number of companies that had never made recruitments through this platform are now testing the waters.
“The number of requests from big brands and companies has been going up. In another two weeks, we will be announcing more hackathons where many big companies in the field of technology, mobile, startup, would be hiring. Hackathons are disrupting how companies are hiring and this is the future,” Panigrahi said.