Every year, the PageUp Hackathon empowers our teams to channel their creativity and come up with innovative solutions to the toughest hiring problems. RevUp 2023 was no exception – a buzzing hub of ideas and enthusiasm, as our teams experimented with the hottest topic in tech today: how to harness AI. The three day internal event saw nine teams across multiple regions come together to see how AI could help improve candidate experience, increase personalisationpersonalization, drive automation and streamline hiring processes across the board.
Why a Hackathon?
A hackathon is a time-limited event where teams work collaboratively to develop solutions to a specific problem or challenge. The goal of the PageUp hackathon is innovation: to enable creativity, encourage experimentation, and generate innovative ideas. These ideas are evaluated and workshopped, to provide a starting point for future additions to our product roadmap.
“Innovation is core to PageUp’s values. A hackathon creates deliberate space and time for our teams to come together to brainstorm and workshop solutions, based on the industry insights from our research team, and valuable feedback from our customers – plus, it’s a lot of fun. It gives our team the chance to take a step back and look at things differently”
—Aaron Hardy, VP Product – PageUp Platform
Our product team are continually focused on finding ways to support talent teams to address diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I), flexible work, and the skills shortage. With the rise of ChatGPT, we couldn’t talk tech without experimenting with how to use AI to overcome these challenges and enhance hiring processes. So, this became the focus of PageUp’s 2023 Hackathon, RevUp.
Judging Criteria
As our teams set out to solve real-life customer problems, we decided to bring in members from our customer-facing and internal talent acquisition teams to be our judges — those who are intimately aware of our customers’ pain-points. In the evaluation process, the teams were assessed on a comprehensive list of criteria including:
- The level of business impact the project had
- The degree of innovation displayed in the solution
- The quality of the user experience
- The technical difficulty involved in its implementation
PageUp Interview Companion: a standout solution
The winning team, PageUp Interview Companion, took home three awards “Best of Screening”, “People’s Choice Award” and the coveted “RevUp 2023 Overall Winner”.
The Interview Companion is an innovative AI tool that enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of interviews for hiring teams. This tool offers various features, including customised prompts for interviewers to ask follow-up questions, note-taking and summarisationsummarization functionalities, and more. This helps hiring managers to drill down on identifying the right candidates, with the right skills, while reducing the impact of human bias in the interview.
Brad Barnett, the driving force behind the Interview Companion, developed the idea based
on his experience as a hiring manager and his recognition of the potential offered by cutting-edge AI technologies such as ChatGPT.
“We know that one of the biggest challenges for hiring managers is understanding if a candidate is genuine in their representation of themselves. Using AI and technology like ChatGPT in the interview process will help hiring managers validate a candidate’s suitability by providing a more nuanced and less biased assessment.”
—Brad Barnett, CTO – PageUp Platform
Where to from here?
Overall the RevUp Hackathon was an incredible success, with an amazing showcase of presentations from our talented teams. Each team highlighted innovative solutions that were focused on the needs of customers – and improving candidate and user experience.
“Our customers are the centre of everything we do. So, their feedback and input is crucial to developing our product roadmap. These sessions give us the chance to take insights from our customers, insights from the market, and really go wild with ‘blue-skies’ ideas. Those ideas are then tested with customers, analysts, and users to prioritise what is most valuable to bring to market.”
—Aaron Hardy, VP Product – PageUp Platform
The event not only highlighted the impressive skills of the teams but also demonstrated the exciting future for the HR Tech industry. We’re excited to see how some of these prototype solutions could come to life to support candidates, recruiters and hiring managers throughout the hiring experience.
If you’d like to learn more about PageUp, or if you’re a customer who’d like to help us shape our future solutions, get in touch today.
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