Hacking SmartRecruiters

Published in

Smart Up

5 min readMar 18, 2018

For many of us — software engineers, hackers, and creators — hackathons are considered as best events which can happen throughout the year. No wonder why — if you enjoy creating things out of nothing and turning them into actual product, you cannot find a better place to do this other than a hackathon.

There’s a limited amount of time, there’s a team of people willing to change the world (at least a bit), and of course there’s this unique idea to develop and implement. Some of us — SmartRecruiters Engineers — had this amazing chance to participate in such event during Hiring Success 18' — probably the best conference for everyone interested in recruiting and HR industry. Do you want to learn something more about it? I know you do!

Every single action movie about special ops people starts with these classic shots of their headquarters, along with some details about date and time. Let’s do the same.

The Stage — San Francisco, CA

Location — San Francisco, CA, USA
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Date — March 13th, 2018
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Time — 12:00 — ETA 24h

In one of the rooms of Hyatt Regency hotel four teams have been involved into building a completely new solution on top of SmartRecruiters Public API. There was team Avery Dennison, with their tool to schedule and manage postings (public job ads), there was team Visa building internal mobility portal, there was team Square working on Hiring Committee solution, and there was also team SmartRecruiters creating a Facebook extension to apply for a job from it.

Each team was responsible for inventing and providing an end-to-end product in terms of business requirements, technical analysis, design and actual implementation based on our own API. That’s why members of each team consisted of software developers, designers, analytics and what’s the most important thing here — representatives of actual SmartRecruiters users who understand the best how this business works.

Ready? Set? Go!

All of us started this hackathon by trying to figure out requirements of MVPs — thanks to our partners from Visa, Avery Dennison and Square we were able to quickly define the core parts of our future products. Then, actual implementation happened. It would be nice to spend even more time on planning and discussing individual features of our projects, but we had 22h left and the clock was ticking even faster.

Agile — that’s how they call it.

How this development worked out? Well — in such conditions you can imagine tons of improvisation, rush, people in hurry, bits of frustration, and of course our beloved jet lag. All in all — it was amazing! By the end of first day most of us managed to build a foundation for their projects and — while struggling with tiredness — all of us were really satisfied with the effects of their work. Some hackers went to sleep just to be awaken 3 hours later and get back to coding. #Impact

And then, the second day happened. With about 4–6 hours left every hacker was trying to find the sweet spot between delivering on-time and on-quality.

Some participants were validating actual progress of their work with customers, while others were focused only on missing features which were waiting for their time. Instead of quarters and month, we were thinking in hours and minutes. But it worked well! 24 hours after hackathon opening, precisely on March 14th, 12:00 PM we were asked to stop the work and then we were invited to seat in front rows of the main conference room and along with our partners we were enjoying the demos of these projects created during this positively crazy hackathon.

It was time for pitching in front of jury of three (and about 1000 other participants of Hiring Success conference).

The Grand Finale

Who were the winners? Team Visa. Although it’s important to mention this fact, it’s much more important to understand and appreciate the broader context of this event.

First — there was a great conference happening, which is now considered as de facto must-go event.

Second — there was a hackathon happening, which proves how much effort we put into promoting our own engineering culture inside and outside of SmartRecruiters.

Third — four great products have been born, which now can be used as a something to iterate over and enhance on a daily basis.

And last but not least — some great partnerships with our customers have been built, and probably that’s the thing we appreciate the most.