Prabhash Bachhuwan / 4 Mins Read
Updated: June 27, 2023
Hackathons are a powerful tool to bring new solutions and ideas to your organization.
Hackathons - defined as an event with the primary aim of promoting collaborative computer programming - is a popular trend in the technical community. The concepts of Hackathons witnessed a sudden rise in popularity mainly owing to its convenient nature and the added benefits that it bestows upon the organizing company.
Hackathons are prioritized to be organized annually by most of the companies within the technological field for various reasons. If you’re eager to know how Hackathons can benefit you and your company, the following will aid you to enlighten yourself about the same.
Hackathons are generally events that are organized for a duration of several days. Each day has a varying set of challenges or activities that participants are supposed to indulge in. These activities or challenges can be the ideal method to promote the sense of collaboration and teamwork within your employees.
This is mainly due to the fact that the challenges that are usually presented in Hackathon events are designed to be solved by the contributions of several team members instead of an individual.
Due to the same, team members are encouraged to aid each other in solving the given problem to come up with the most efficient solution for the same. This eventually leads to improving your employee’s ability to work within a team which directly contributes to better results and outputs.
As stated in the State of Hackathons report created by Mettl, hiring reliable talents remains to be one of the primary reasons for which organizations conduct hackathons. A hackathon is a reliable method for the same primarily because of its customizable nature and its ability to be curated according to the preferences of the organizing company.
Therefore, a Hackathon event can serve as the ideal hiring protocol to ensure that the company hires only the individual that perfectly fit their desired requirements of skills and talents. This ultimately leads to an increase in the overall efficiency of the company since, owing to the hackathon event, will be hiring only the candidates that prove themselves superior to the other participants.
Added to that, the organizing entity can ensure better hiring efficiency while being maintaining cost-effectiveness which indirectly contributes to the optimal functioning of the company.
We live in a world where the technological aspect is being constantly updated. Therefore, to be relevant in this rapidly evolving era, there is a dire need of keeping your employees updated about the recent technological trends and enhancements.
However, teaching every employee about a specific enhanced software demands excessive expenditure of valuable resources. Although considering the significance of teaching new skills to pre-existing employees, the same cannot be completely ignored.
Hackathons can act as a cost-effective and efficient method to teach your employees about enhanced technologies and aid them to add new skills to their resume. Added to that, they can also create a balance between understanding the theoretical concepts and having the practical experience for the involved employees since they’ll be utilizing the newly taught concepts to solve the given problems collectively.
Indirectly, this also contributes to employees devoting themselves to your company due to the annual opportunity to improve their pre-existing skill set.
Hackathons are considered as crucial opportunities for innovators where they can showcase their skills and gain significant exposure within the community. This is seen as an opportunity by the organizing entities to contribute to the technology industry by providing the young innovators with a platform to enhance and demonstrate their talents.
Therefore, organizing Hackathons will not only aid you to ensure the proper functioning of your business but will also allow you to give back to the community. Added to that, according to a report published by Mettl, 30% of the surveyed organization stated that they mainly conduct Hackathons for Social Branding.
Added to the above-mentioned social benefit, organizing Hackathons is also seen as the ideal method for improving the social impression and branding of your company. If you were to give the youth and their budding talent a convenient platform where they can prove their abilities to the world, you and your company will be seen in a good light.
The social impression of your brand directly contributes to building a sense of trust within your customers which, ultimately, leads to better revenue generation and increased flow of leads.
The developer community is known for being brimming with brilliant minds with each of them have their unique set of critical thinking skills and cognitive abilities.
Due to the same, involving the developer community within a Hackathon event can lead to potentially uncovering the breakthrough that you didn’t you were actually looking for.
The potential development or solutions that you might uncover during a Hackathon event has the ability to pave your way to being the next crucial link for the development of the industry.
This is just an additional perk to organizing hackathons. However, for most of the companies, just the chance of discovering something revolutionary is enough reason for organizing these competitive computer programming events. Any development during the course of the event can later be improved upon to create full-fledged service that can serve as an additional source of income for the company.
Hackathons, given their customizability, can be created to be flexible events where the participants have the freedom for being creative and creating unique solutions for a specific problem. This inspires the participants to innovate to the best of their abilities. Any significant development during the course of the event can be used by the organizing entity as inspiration to something new.
However, the most significant factor in organizing a hackathon is the cost-effectiveness for the same. Assuming that the organizing company already possesses the required technological equipment, there is barely any additional investment involved in organizing the event.
Considering the sheer number of benefits that your company is bestowed with by organizing a Hackathon event, any kind of investment will be well worth it.
To summarize the above-mentioned, Hackathons are arguably the most efficient and reliable method for an organization to improve its functioning efficiency along with enhancing their social image within the industry. Considering the customizable and cost-effective nature of hackathon events, you should prioritize organizing these events occasionally if you wish to scale your company for the near future.
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Prabhash Bachhuwan is a content marketer who is an active contributor to Mettl‘s blog. A writer by day and a reader by night, the one who believes there is no sharper sword than the pen. Mettl is an HR company and leading talent measurement firm that enables businesses to make precise people decisions in talent recruitment, management and training across industry verticals.
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