Hiring the best and brightest software engineer is becoming one of the biggest challenges for many companies and startups, as there are more software developer openings than qualified people to fill them, according to the research from the app association there are 223,000 job openings for software developers in the US alone while the demand for applications predicted to grow three times by 2020.

With hiring challenges such as lack of experience, technical skills and software skills (workplace experience), and high salary demand, we have to ditch the old-school and replace it with more innovative and up-to-date methods to attract the right talents.

Here are 6 main reasons why you should consider online hackathons and coding challenges for your next hire:

 

1. Attract qualified candidates: Hackathons and coding challenges attract aspiring talents looking for a dynamic organization that values innovation and collaboration, talents who are up for a real-life challenge and aren’t afraid to tap into a competitive space to show their skills and bring what they have to the table.

2. Asses your candidates’ problem-solving skills, how they see real-time problems and the steps they take to tackle them is as important as the final solution they reach.

3. Test teamwork and collaborative skills, since online hackathons allow for working in teams, you can assess skills that can be very hard to test through interviews or home assignments like leadership and teamwork.

4. Working under pressure, since online hackathons are tied with a limited timeline, you get to test who can endure extended hours of intensive work to solve a certain problem when needed.

5. It’s efficient yet flexible! based on your timeline and resources, you get to choose the scale, ranging from a coding challenge that only takes a few hours, to a hackathon which takes from a few days to a few weeks. It is worth mentioning here that it has been observed that the recruitment time is cut down by almost 80% in hackathons

6. Evaluate accurately based on a set of predefined skills, giving scores based on all of the previously mentioned criteria rather than just the final output.

 

To conclude, many companies are moving towards online hackathons to reach the right talent as it is a cost-effective and time-efficient method, especially when using a dedicated platform to run the whole thing, you can pick a convenient software based on your budget and the kind of support you are looking for.

We encourage you to try your first experience with online hackathons and share with us how it went!

You can check out Untap Compete solutions here.