The concept of hackathon is famous mainly in the world’s startup hubs such as San Francisco, New York, London, Berlin and Tel Aviv. However, its popularity is increasing in Slovakia, as well. Our team from Campus Cowork in cooperation with HR market leader Elanor organized the first hackathon fully focused on human resources.
Since the moment in 2018, when the idea to establish Campus was born, it’s been our ambition to create the right environment for creative and innovative entrepreneurs in which they could develop apps, software and products with a global potential. We believe that such opportunities are the basis for the knowledge economy and bring experts from various fields to Slovakia.
Slovakia has a range of skillful designers and software developers with clients from around the globe and it is not rare that their products are sold to the big players. Thanks to digitalization, entering new markets is even easier. Elanor HR challenge managed to attract the best from the segment. 5 teams joined the HR hackathon – stylers.cloud, Revolware, Netgrif, ProjectON and Pixwell.
Usually, a hackathon lasts between 24 to 48 hours, during which the competing teams work on their software solution, have networking sessions, eat a lot of pizza and drink liters of energy drinks. In this case, the time limit was set to a bit more than 24 hours. The event started on Friday, September 10 at 2pm and the winners were announced the next day at 5 pm.
So how did the winning team win?
There were three challenges and to win the prize money 5,000 EUR it was enough to present one successful solution. Martin Hrabovec and his team Revolware are gaining win after win as after succeeding at Startup weekend, “Rozbehni sa! najlepší nápad” or Swiss Re hackathon they won the Elanor HR Challenge 2021, as well. The main goal of the event was to disrupt the current processes of HR and bring innovation to Elanor software.
“The assignment was quite difficult, it was a real challenge. Elanor software is a complex solution and it took us some time to understand where to even begin,“ says Martin Hrabovec.
Martin and his team were eager to fight to be rewarded with the titul “the most innovative solution” and win the prize money of 5,000 EUR. They stayed in Campus whole night and worked on the assignment.
“It was incredible to see the amount of energy, humour and ingenuity such young men showed during the presentation in the finale. I have 20+ years experience in IT business and sales and I cas say that being human and professional is what makes a difference,“ said CEO of Campus Cowork, Tomas Ocenas, after being part of the jury.
What is the biggest advantage of a hackathon?
It is important to say that even though there is just one winner, none of the competing teams lost. Everyone gained new business connections, invaluable experience, chance to start a new partnership and, as a bonus, it was surely a great team building. The teams proved how powerful a hackathon can be.
Exploring new and unknown environments, excitement, professional team expertise, getting in touch with the startup world or learning how to do quick challenge analysis and realise it in a few hours. That is what you get when attending a hackathon.
“We are very satisfied with the event’s outcome. There were no expectations about the coming results. However, we got five top-level solutions and all of them were immediately applicable to our business. This was definitely not the last event of its kind organized by our company. We are excited to join with startupists again and bring innovation to the HR segment,“ concluded the board member of Elanor group, Ondrej Kolarik.
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