SimpliHack – World’s First Education Technology Hackathon Event!

In the last few years ‘Hackathon’ is one event that has emerged as a great way for companies and coders (prospective employees) to meet and understand each other. For the ones who do not know what a Hackathon means, then Wikipedia states it as a portmanteau of “hack” and “marathon“, where “hack” is used in the sense of playful, exploratory programming. However to put it in simpler words, it is an event which is held within a short duration of time maybe between 12-36 hours for engineers and creative people to get together and build or design a demo or a new feature or product – anything that is created from a scratch to a full-fledged solution in a finite amount of time. The entire process from idea creation to execution is almost like building a micro-startup. In fact quite a few teams do step out of a hackathon and go on to build a company.

Between 28th Feb and 1st Mar 2015, Simplilearn, the largest certification based training company, is conducting its very first Hackathon – SimpliHack. Elaborating about the same, the company COO, Gerald Jaideep says, “Every technology company wants to reach out that elusive group of programmers who are passionate, talented and entrepreneurial. As this special breed of coders are rarely found on a job site, this hackathon is a great way of bringing this talent to the fore. We, at Simplilearn are proud to present the first education industry related hackathon.”

Gone are the days when one used to crack an interview with one’s ability to sell themselves over an interview, today the biggest mantra is ‘more doing, less talking.’ Hosting a hackathon event where coders come in and work on defined problem, is a disruptive recruitment strategy. Talented developers will often come in as they are looking to shine among peers apart from messing around with a new technology that they might have never used before. Moreover, the fact that you are competing against your peers, for a cash prize, brings out the competitive edge in everyone.

Jaideep further states, “The main objective for us to host a hackathon apart from solving recruitment problems, is also to find out an array of potential entrepreneurs who might have a wonderful idea that might not fall in line with our business, but we can support them in developing it for us. Also there is a misconception in the market that we are a training company, however the truth is, we are a technology company that provides a platform for professionals to pursue their choice of professional certification training, therefore it is also a mechanism for brand identity correction among the job seekers.”

Through the hackathon a potential employer can gauge the distinct abilities of a candidate including ability to work in a team, creativity and innovation, ability to deliver while under pressure apart from showcasing his problem solving skills etc.

Jitendra Kumar, CTO-Simplilearn says, “There will be three challenges that will be put across to the participants and based on that we will decide the winners and award them with a cash prize apart from a job offer.”

“There are three things we plan to achieve from SimpliHack; first - recruiting the best hidden talents, second – solving the existing learning problems and third – encouraging ethical hacking as a culture for solving future problems apart from positioning ourselves as a learning technological company rather than a training provider,” says Giridharan Natarajan – Product Head at Simplilearn explaining about what they plan to achieve from their impending hackathon.

On a final note Jaideep said, “As Simplilearn is growing, so are our needs to staff the best talents available in the market. If SimpliHack gives us the desired results then we plan to organize one hackathon every five to six months not only to solve our recruitment problems but also to identify some future entrepreneurs to get associated with us.”

Simplilearn is one of the leading professional certifications and training destinations in the world with a repertoire of 200+ courses and have trained around 200,000+ professionals worldwide.

If you are someone who loves challenges then this is the right opportunity for you to look at. SimpliHack will be held on 28th February and 1st March, 2015 at the Simplilearn Bangalore office around 09:00hrs. For more details and to register for the same, kindly visit http://www.venturesity.com/simplihack.html

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Shaiju Mathew is an Indian author, social media strategist, blogger, reviewer, screenplay writer, and short film director, known for his 2010 book Knocked Up and short film Planchette. For more information please visit his webpage www.shaijumathew.com or blog www.shaiju-mathew.blogspot.in. You can also check him out on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaiju_Mathew)