It’s our fourth Hack at SEEK and the organisation committee have things down pat. The fruit/lolly balance has been established, the pitch pulpit runs catastrophe free and the judges are able to move around the buzzing marketplace with relative ease.
But the real magic is the quality of the hacks. We’ve always known that the staff at SEEK are a talented bunch. It’s why we hire them. But this time round the judges have an almost impossible task in awarding only six teams with titles for their hacking efforts.
36 teams have hacked for two days in the superhero themed Hackt4stic hackathon 4. Almost all of the hacks are production ready and every single one of them meets a business need, whether it be improving the way we work, improving the way our customers interact with us, completely changing the way our customers interact with us or purely living the passion that we live and breathe at SEEK and challenging the status quo. The teams are proud of their efforts, and they should be.
The first award to be announced at the award ceremony is The Ubergeek, which is the award for the most bleeding edge, technologically advanced and buzzword compliant innovation. Arguably, the most coveted award for our technology team.
Our Director of Technology, Tim Smart awards first prize to team “Inter-hackinational”. It’s a mouthful and there’s good reason for it. This hack offers a radically different approach to the way we currently deploy our infrastructure. Using Linux to build a fully managed, load balanced infrastructure that is fully portable.
Next up is the Mobile First award for the best mobile innovation/hack, a tough decision for Product Director, Doug Blue. First prize is awarded to a project “Seinfeld”. The Seinfeld team used technology new to SEEK to build an innovative way to engage both advertisers and candidates.
Doug also has the pleasure of announcing the next award- The Disrupter. The Disrupter winner has the potential to have the biggest business impact. Team “Rise of the Machines” wins this hack for their use of NLP, Bayesian, and other automated classification techniques to create and cluster structured data lists in search. The team themselves were amazed at what they were able to achieve in two days of hacking and have been able to revolutionise the way we use our data.
Delivery and Operations Director Craig Penfold presented our Internal Innovation award for the hack that is the best internal workplace improvement. Project Uplift got a special mention for installing a clock in the Melbourne building Lifts but the winner was team “re:Search” who investigated opportunities for our platforms.
Sales and Service Director Mike Game presented the next award and expressed his excitement at the quality of the hacks. For the The Marketer prize for Most creative branding, campaign and sales pitch he awarded first place to Project Halo. The Halo team created a client dashboard resolving current inefficiencies for our sales and service teams.
Lastly to present the Ship It award, the Most Valuable hack and the People’s Choice awards was our Managing Director Mike Ilczynski. To start things off, in his own words “because he can” he used his power, and budget, to create a new hack prize the “Hack for good” award. He awarded this to team “Camp Hackathon”. Led by L&D manager Sarah Redmond, this is an amazing new project with a huge focus on social responsibility which will run its pilot program in September. Watch this space for more information!
The Ship It award was a hard one to judge. With so many hacks almost production ready and all of them making perfect sense ,we have a fantastic four projects which will be released to market. These solve candidate pain points, hirer pain points and meet gaps in our current product offerings. Again, more info to follow as these are built and released.
The Most Valuable Hack award from the hack teams went to Seinfeld and the People’s Choice award went to Project Halo.
“OUR ANCESTORS CALLED IT MAGIC BUT YOU CALL IT SCIENCE. I COME FROM A LAND WHERE THEY ARE ONE AND THE SAME.”
Chris Hemsworth, Thor
The collaboration between members of different parts of the business was impressive. By pushing boundaries and working with no constraints except of course time, the teams managed to expose skills that might not have been used in their every days jobs, challenged themselves with new or different technology and showed a strategy led business that they’re doing the right thing in giving these guys a few opportunities a year to challenge the road map and put their two cents in.
The hack committee may have been dressed in capes and masks but the true superheroes are our SEEK Staff.
“I STAYED IN AND STUDIED LIKE A GOOD LITTLE NERD. AND FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, I’M ONE OF THE GREATEST MINDS OF THE 21ST CENTURY.”
Ioan Gruffudd, Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
