Contest Recruitment

Hiring Through Student Competitions

• You get a wider pool of aspirants as opposed to when you might have posted a job description on a single website.
• This pool of aspirants would be much more vibrant and talented. The people willing to take part in a competition to showcase their skills are smarter and more willing to take up initiatives.
• You get the opportunity to sell your brand through such activities. It’s basically killing two birds with one stone, you get the desired recruits and also get great PR.
• You can customize the game levels according to your requirements. There is no one-size-fits-all rule here.

Creating games/competitions for the specific purpose of recruitment is a detailed process. It starts with an assessment of the job in question and the requirement of the organization and goes through several steps before ending with the final result. Instead of spending your time and resources on the same, it is advisable to hire professionals for this job.

The Benefits of Recruiting Contest and Award Winners

There are numerous reasons why you should recruit contest and award winners. Some of the primary reasons include:

• It’s easy. Finding the winners is incredibly easy because the names of the winners and the finalists are almost always published.
• Selection is based on results. Contests focus on results rather than the more prominent screening criteria of education or experience. As a result, when you recruit an award winner, you’re getting someone that has actually produced superior results.
• They’re a great source of ideas. If you run the contest, even if you don’t end up hiring one of the winners, you do get to capture all of the answers and ideas that were generated. Many times, the business value of these ideas far outweighs the cost of the contest.
• It’s also a learning tool. After identifying award and contest winners, the conversations with them can be great learning mechanisms, whether you hire them or not.
• Referrals are another output. Obviously, you can’t hire every award winner, but you can certainly build a relationship with them and use them as a referral source. They might refer mentees, people they know, or even members of their own team that need new experiences or who are in dead-end positions.
• It’s cheap. If the contest is run by someone else, there’s no cost in capturing the names of the winners. If you run the contest, most entries can be done online, so there’s no paper and the administration is easier. For software contests, the entries can even be assessed automatically using software.
• It’s low-volume and high-quality. Most recruiting sources get you high-volume and low-quality candidates and, as a result, sorting is a nightmare. However, when you’re recruiting award winners and contest champions, there are no “turkeys” to screen out. All of them are winners, and often even non-winner participants are also top performers (in the Academy Awards, even the losers for Best Picture are probably outstanding).
• They’re less biased. Because most contests are anonymous and are based on real problems, the process is generally less biased than most face-to-face selection processes.
• It’s global. Because contests can be web-based, it’s possible to get global award winners and thus global recruiting targets without having to get on an airplane.

Some additional examples might further convince you that it’s time for you to catch up and take advantage of this approach.

• Top Coder. Clearly a best practice leader when it comes to running challenges in the software industry. It holds worldwide electronic code writing contests to identify the very best in software engineering for forward-thinking firms like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Not only do top contestants get job offers, but Top Coder figured out how to leverage the contests to produce code that they could, in turn, sell to organizations. Codewalkers provides similar contests in the web application and development area. WizardHunt offers “contestware” for firms.
• Matching problems with problem-solvers. One company, InnoCentive, was recently highlighted in Bill Taylor’s leading-edge “Mavericks” column in The New York Times. InnoCentive’s leading-edge site allows companies to post their latest problems online and provides problem solvers an opportunity to submit solutions. The winning solution gets a monetary prize and the company gets outstanding answers and the names of some outstanding problem-solvers. If you can propose a catalyst system for an improved synthesis of a monoresorcinyl-triazine, your solution could be worth $50,000.
• Professional associations. Nearly every professional association holds both national and local awards and contests. For example, the IEEE holds an annual Robotics Challenge, a prime recruiting event for electrical and mechanical engineers.
• Department of Defense. Even the government has gotten into the contest game, offering prizes for university teams that develop driverless cross-country vehicles. Hanging around the pits at these events will produce candidates who are several levels above those who can be found at most college career centers.
• Quicken loans. This forward-thinking firm has contest plans for the best customer service person and the best salesperson.
• The best wait person. One major hotel chain held a “find the best waitress/waiter contest,” challenging its employees to identify the very best in their city. In essence, this created the world’s first employee referral contest.
• Student challenges. Colleges have been holding “drop the egg from the roof” and “Concrete Canoe” contests for years, and the winners are highly sought after. Similarly, winners of debate contests are sought out as potential salespeople, and photography and film contests make it easy to identify the best students in media.
• Scholarship contests. There is no better way to get detailed information about the best college students than offering a scholarship and then utilizing the application data to identify potential college interns or hires.
• The best nurse. The New York Times recently ran a full-page ad asking individuals around the United States to submit the names and stories of wonderful nurses. Think of the learning, referral, and recruiting value if you could develop a contest or process that captured the names and stories of the best nurses in your region.
• NFL-type draft. National Oilwell Varco holds an internal NFL-style draft for its college hires after they complete their initial rotations. A brilliant approach because competition raises management’s attention, and it also brings out the best in almost all situations.
• The best in HR. Even SHRM holds Jeopardy-type contests among its university chapters. Anyone who wins an Optimas or ERE Recruiting Excellence award is certainly also at the top in his or her field.
• The best salesperson. If you spend a lot of time at the bars of hotels that cater to a lot of company events, just look for those with brand-new Hawaiian shirts or leis around their necks. Invariably, they just won the best salesperson award and thus, a free trip to Hawaii.
• Interactive Brokers Group has an electronic trading Olympiad, the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, which helps identify the best at building barriers to hackers. In addition, Legoland California has a contest to find the best model builder, and L’Oreal has its e-Strat challenge.