How BET Software Turned a Virtual Hackathon into a High-Signal Talent Acquisition Engine

When Hiring Engineers Becomes Deeply Human

Hiring great engineers has never been more complex.

On one side, organisations have more tools, platforms and assessments than ever. On the other, the experience often feels the same: a message in the inbox, a job link, a coding test, a few interviews, and a long silence.

Meanwhile, the people you most want to hire are looking for something different. They’re asking themselves:

• Will my work here feel meaningful, not just busy?

• Will I keep learning and stretching my skills?

• Will this process be fair and transparent?

• Will I join a team that takes engineering, and people, seriously?

Traditional processes can test individual skills. But they rarely show how someone behaves inside a real team, or what it feels like to build with your organisation. That’s the gap.

In 2025, BET Software decided not to add another interview step or new assessment tool. Instead, they set out to design a talent acquisition experience that engineers would genuinely want to be part of, and that would give their hiring teams richer, more human signals.

Together with Otinga as an innovation partner, and OfferZen as a tech. talent platform, BET Software ran a fully virtual FinTech Innovation Hackathon as a focused talent acquisition experiment: 36 hours of building, learning and collaborating on real payment challenges, in full view of mentors and hiring managers.

This case study is the story of that experiment, how a carefully designed virtual hackathon helped BET Software build a stronger pipeline, elevate its employer brand, and test a scalable model for turning ideas (and events) into hiring outcomes.

Why This Story Matters Now

Across boardrooms and leadership conversations, similar questions keep surfacing: How do you stand out in a noisy talent market? How do you trust your hiring decisions when CVs and coding tests all start to blur together? How do you give candidates an experience that reflects the culture you’re trying to build?

The BET Software hackathon sits right at the intersection of those questions. It shows what happens when:

• Talent acquisition is treated as a designed experience, not just a pipeline of requisitions.

• An AI-powered hackathon platform and a virtual world are used to support people, not replace them.

• Behaviour, collaboration and follow-through are given as much weight as pure technical skill.

At its core, this story keeps circling back to three simple questions:

• Can a virtual hackathon act as a serious talent acquisition engine, not just a branding moment?

• What kinds of signals about people emerge when they build together under pressure, that never show up in a CV or standard interview loop?

• How do you design that experience so it works for everyone involved; the organisation, the hiring team, and the engineers who choose to take part?

For leaders, the hackathon becomes a focused experiment inside clear guardrails: low-risk, insight-rich, and aligned to strategic priorities.

For engineers, it feels less like being filtered, and more like being invited into a meaningful, time-boxed challenge.

The chapters that follow trace that journey; from the talent challenge BET Software faced, through the design of the hackathon itself, to the results, lessons and the road this opens for organisations that want talent acquisition to work better for everyone involved.

A Quick Look at the Scale

The decision to run a virtual fintech hackathon could have gone many ways. In this case, it turned into a concentrated burst of attention, commitment and output. Before getting into the mechanics, it’s worth pausing on what actually happened over those few weeks of build-up and that one focused weekend.

On the surface, the numbers tell a simple story:

• R 50,000 In Prizes

• Over 2,300 applications from engineers willing to step into a demanding, skills-based hiring experience.

• Over 600 candidates shortlisted through a structured screening flow on the Otinga platform.

• Around 160 finalists invited into the live hackathon cohort.

• Over 130 participants who cleared their calendars and showed up for 36 hours of building.

• More than 50 teams formed around real fintech problem statements.

• Over 40 demos delivered at the end of the sprint.

• A completion rate above 90%, significantly higher than the ±60% completion typically seen in open public hackathons.

Looked at through a talent acquisition lens, each stage in the journey signalled something different: applications at this scale pointed to broad interest and strong brand pull; shortlisting then concentrated that interest into a pool of people with a clear baseline fit for the kind of work BET Software does; moving from shortlist to finalist invitations and actually showing up for the weekend revealed motivation and intent, the engineers who were willing to give up real time to engage deeply; and, finally, making it to demo day showcased follow-through, collaboration and resilience under real constraints.

Seen from this angle, the hackathon wasn’t simply a big event on the calendar. It became a structured journey from curiosity to commitment, turning a noisy market into a smaller group of engineers who had already shown they were willing to lean in, learn and deliver.

The Partners Behind the Weekend

Numbers alone don’t explain why a format like this holds together. The other half of the story lives in the mix of partners standing behind the scenes.

A Small Ecosystem with a Big Role

At the centre was BET Software: the hiring organisation with a clear need for strong engineering talent, a defined culture, and a willingness to open its doors to the developer community in a visible way.

Around that centre sat a focused group of partners:

• Otinga

  Otinga’s role was to give the hackathon structure. The Otinga platform handled the heavy lifting that usually fragments a hiring initiative: applications, screening, team formation, judging rubrics, communication, and the capture of soft-skill signals from hiring managers. Instead of juggling spreadsheets, email threads and ad-hoc notes, everything flowed through a single system designed for innovation events and talent challenges. That meant BET Software’s teams could spend more time mentoring, observing and engaging with people and less time wrestling with logistics.

  On top of that backbone, Otinga also created the virtual venue in Gather.town, the place where all of that structure came to life. Instead of a grid of static video calls, participants stepped into a custom digital space, walked up to teammates, mentors and hiring managers, and worked in areas that felt like real rooms. This made the weekend feel less like a remote assessment and more like a modern, distributed engineering offsite: focused, social and alive.

• OfferZen

  OfferZen brought the right kind of attention into the mix. By tapping into a developer community that already aligns with the type of roles BET Software hires for, the hackathon became more than a generic open call. The engineers who applied had context for who BET Software is, what kind of work they do, and why a fintech-focused weekend might be worth their time. For talent acquisition, that meant a pipeline with more intent and less noise.

• Couchbase, Confluent and Red Hat

  Joined as technology and prize partners. Their presence signalled that the challenges were grounded in real-world stacks and ecosystems, and that the effort involved would be recognised in a meaningful way.

Together, these partners created the conditions for the weekend to work:

• Engineers could see familiar, respected names and understand that this was worth showing up for.

• BET Software could rely on solid infrastructure and distribution, instead of trying to solve everything alone.

• The focus stayed where it mattered most: on the people building, mentoring and making decisions.

  
  

With the numbers on one side and the partner ecosystem on the other, the outline of the story becomes clear: a well-supported, well-attended weekend designed not just to look impressive, but to move talent acquisition forward in a way that felt credible to the organisation and valuable to the people who took part.

The Talent Challenge: Standing Out in a Noisy Market

Long before the first avatar walked into the virtual venue, there was a simpler, tougher question on the table: how does a growing tech company stand out to the kind of engineers who can work anywhere they choose? BET Software operates in a space where senior developers are constantly approached by recruiters, where inboxes fill up with roles that sound interchangeable, and where the hiring journey often blurs into a sequence of tests and calls that all feel the same.

Inside the company, the need was clear. BET Software wanted engineers who could do far more than pass a coding test. The teams were looking for people who could think in systems, work comfortably in complex payment environments, collaborate under pressure and still care about the details. On paper, that translated into skills, stacks and years of experience. In reality, it was about behaviour: ownership, curiosity, resilience and how someone shows up when the problem in front of them is only half-defined.

From the outside, the engineers BET Software wanted to reach were asking their own questions. They weren’t just checking tech stacks and salary bands; they were trying to work out whether a company would give them room to grow, whether the work would feel meaningful, and whether the hiring process would respect their time and effort. A standard interview loop could not answer all of that for either side. It could signal basic competence, but it struggled to reveal how someone behaves in a team, or what it might actually feel like to build next to them day after day.

Against that backdrop, the traditional playbook, more recruiter outreach, more interviews, another standalone assessment, felt incomplete. What was missing was a way to bring both sides into the same space: a format where engineers could experience the company’s culture in action, and where hiring managers could watch people solve real problems with real peers, not just answer hypothetical questions.

The decision to run a virtual fintech hackathon grew out of this gap. It wasn’t about putting on a show; it was about creating a single, focused moment where talent acquisition could be anchored in real work, real behaviour and a shared experience that made sense for both BET Software and the engineers they hoped to hire.

What We Built: A Virtual FinTech Talent Hackathon

Once the decision was made to move beyond traditional interviews and assessments, the next question was simple: what kind of format can carry everything BET Software cares about: real engineering work, real behaviour, real interaction, without breaking the day-to-day machine? The answer took shape as a virtual fintech hackathon, designed very intentionally as a talent acquisition format rather than a side project.

What a Hackathon Looks Like in This Context

In everyday language, a hackathon is a short, intense period where people come together to solve real problems and build working prototypes.

For this initiative, that idea was translated into a structure that made sense for both BET Software and the engineers who joined:

• Time-boxed focus

  A 36-hour window where teams had to understand a real payments challenge, design an approach, write and test code, and be demo-ready at the end.

• Real-world problem space

  Challenges sat inside the world BET Software knows best - fintech, platforms and the future of how money moves.

• Teams, not individuals

  Participants formed teams, split work, made trade-offs and dealt with the friction that comes with genuine collaboration.

• A clear finish line

  Every team worked towards a live demo, presented to people who understood both the technical and business context.

  
  

For BET Software, this looked much closer to day-to-day reality than a standard test: incomplete information, time pressure, competing opinions and the need to make sensible engineering decisions.

For participants, it felt less like “being tested” and more like joining a compressed product sprint with clear guardrails.

Designing the Format Around BET’s Talent Challenge

The format wasn’t chosen for novelty. It was built to answer the specific challenge BET Software faced: standing out to strong engineers while getting deeper insight into who might thrive inside the organisation.

A few design decisions made that link clear:

• FinTech as the anchor theme

  The hackathon focused on the future of payments, signalling the kind of problems engineers would work on if they joined, and attracting people genuinely interested in that space.

• Virtual by design

  Running online opened the door to talent across regions, reduced logistical friction and made it easier for busy engineers to say yes.

• Space for behaviour to surface

  The format created multiple moments where ownership, teamwork, communication and resilience could naturally show up – not as interview questions, but as live behaviour.

Seen through a talent acquisition lens, this wasn’t just a weekend event. It was a deliberate way to watch how people work when the stakes are real enough to matter, but safe enough to experiment.

The Infrastructure: AI-Powered Platform & Virtual Venue

To keep the experience structured, fair and scalable, the hackathon ran on two tightly connected foundations: Otinga’s AI-powered innovation platform and Gather.town as the virtual venue.

Otinga: the AI-powered hackathon backbone

Otinga sat behind both the front door and the engine room of the hackathon.

On the front end, Otinga designed and built the application landing page, the place where engineers first arrived, understood the value of the hackathon, and decided whether to opt in. The messaging, structure and flow were all geared towards talent acquisition: clear expectations, a strong sense of what participants would gain, and a simple path from interest to application.

Behind the scenes, the Otinga AI-powered hackathon platform acted as the control centre:

• Managed participants & provided all resources that they would need

• Logged ideas, projects and team formation

• Provided clear judging rubrics and scoring workflows

• Automated communications and reminders

• Captured both technical outcomes and behavioural observations from hiring managers

• Supported sponsorship conversations

• Designed the marketing and communication campaigns

  
  

For BET Software, this meant every step, from the first visit to the landing page through to the final demo, lived in one connected system. Innovation at scale stayed simple: one backbone, many human touchpoints.

For participants, it meant clarity and consistency. The story was the same from the moment they discovered the hackathon to the moment they submitted their final work, with clear criteria, clear timelines and a feeling that everyone was playing by the same rules.

Gather.town: the human layer

Gather.town turned the event from a grid of video calls into a living space:

• Each person appeared as a customised avatar in a custom virtual venue, specifically built for the hackathon

• Walking up to someone opened voice and video, just like approaching them in a physical room

• Teams had their own areas to build in, mentors could drop in and out, and hiring managers could wander the “floor”

  
  

For BET Software, this created a rich view of how people behaved in a team: who facilitated, who listened, who stayed calm when things broke. Those impressions flowed back into the Otinga platform as structured soft-skill signals.

For participants, it felt more like a high-energy, distributed offsite than a remote test. Focused, social and surprisingly human for something entirely online.

Taken together, the format was simple to describe, a 36-hour virtual fintech hackathon, but carefully assembled underneath. A clear challenge, an AI-powered platform for structure and signal, and a virtual world for connection turned the idea into a practical talent acquisition tool: one that respected engineers’ time, gave hiring teams richer insight, and stayed fully aligned with BET Software’s real context and needs.

A Talent Funnel with Real Signal

Once the format was in place, the question shifted from “Will people show up?” to “What does their journey through this weekend actually tell us?” The answer lives in the shape of the funnel and not just in how many people were involved, but in what each stage said about their intent and behaviour.

From Interest to Delivery

The broad outline of the funnel is already familiar:

• Over 2,300 applications

• Over 600 candidates shortlisted through a structured screening flow

• Around 160 finalists invited into the live cohort

• Over 130 participants who cleared their calendars and joined the 36-hour hackathon

• More than 50 teams formed

• Over 40 demos delivered at the end

  
  

Looked at closely, each step carries its own kind of signal:

• Applications at this scale point to brand pull and curiosity. The story of the hackathon, the partners and the fintech focus resonated strongly enough that thousands of engineers were willing to lean in.

• Shortlisting concentrates that interest into a group with baseline alignment to BET Software’s needs, people whose skills and profiles make sense for the roles that matter.

• Finalist invitations and attendance highlight motivation and commitment. It’s one thing to click “apply”; it’s another to commit an entire weekend to building with strangers around demanding problem statements.

• Demos at the finish line reveal follow-through, collaboration and resilience. Teams that reach this stage have navigated ambiguity, time pressure and the small frictions of working with new people, and still chosen to stand up and show their work.

  
  

For a traditional hiring pipeline, those layers of signal are often spread out across months of touchpoints. Here, they were compressed into a single, clearly defined journey that both sides could understand.

Why Completion Rate Matters for Talent Acquisition

One of the most striking features of this funnel is what happened at the end of it.

Across many public hackathons, it’s common to see only around 60% of teams actually complete and submit a project. People drop off as real-life commitments creep in, as challenges get tough, or as motivation fades.

In this hackathon, over 90% of teams crossed the finish line.

On the surface, that’s a strong operational result. Through a talent acquisition lens, it’s something more important: a clear behavioural signal.

A team that finishes a project under these conditions is showing traits that are hard to fake and hard to surface in a standard interview loop:

• Persistence - staying with a problem when the first idea doesn’t work.

• Follow-through - doing what they said they would do, all the way to demo.

• Accountability to others - showing up for teammates, not just for themselves.

• Adaptability and stamina - managing energy, focus and mood over an extended, intense window.

• Ownership - treating the challenge as if it matters, even though it’s “just” a weekend event.

  
  

For BET Software, this turned completion into a quiet but powerful filter. The engineers who saw the weekend through had already demonstrated behaviours that align closely with high-performing teams in production environments. For hiring managers, that meant starting later conversations with people who had already shown something about how they work, not just what they know.

For participants, the high completion rate said something about the community they stepped into. They weren’t just surrounded by people collecting swag or testing the waters; they were building alongside others who were willing to commit, push through the tired patches and finish what they started.

In many hiring journeys, a funnel is just a diagram on a slide. Here, it became a lived experience. From thousands of initial applications to a handful of teams presenting finished demos, each step revealed more about intent, behaviour and fit. That is where a hackathon stops being “just an event” and starts to act as a genuine talent acquisition engine: not because of the volume at the top, but because of the quality of signal at the bottom.

Human-Centred Hiring and the “Secret Shopper” Lens

As the weekend unfolded, something subtle but important was happening alongside the code commits and design debates. BET Software wasn’t only watching what teams built, but how people showed up for one another: who listened, who led, who stayed open to feedback when the clock was ticking. That’s where the idea of human-centred hiring moved from concept to practice.

Human-centred hiring starts from a simple place: design the process around people, and let technology support that experience rather than the other way around. In this hackathon, that meant clear expectations, meaningful work, real mentorship and a space where engineers could behave naturally, with tools quietly capturing what mattered in the background.

What “Secret Shopper” Meant in This Hackathon

To make those human moments visible in a structured way, Otinga introduced a Secret Shopper layer into the hackathon.

Instead of sitting behind interview panels, hiring managers stepped into the event as active participants:

• They joined the hackathon in Gather.town as avatars, moving through the virtual space like they would through an office or conference floor.

• They dropped into team rooms, listened to discussions, asked questions and watched how people collaborated when they weren’t “on stage”.

• They observed how participants handled stuck moments, disagreements, feedback and fatigue across the 36 hours.

  
  

After these interactions, Secret Shoppers switched over to the Otinga platform and translated what they’d seen into simple, structured soft-skill signals. Instead of vague impressions, they captured observations against a small set of behaviours that matter in real engineering teams, such as:

• Teamwork - how well someone collaborates, includes others and shares context.

• Growth mindset - openness to learning, willingness to adapt, curiosity.

• Coachability - how someone responds when mentors challenge their ideas.

• Leadership - not titles, but moments of initiative, facilitation and calm.

• Critical thinking - how problems are framed, simplified and solved.

• Attention to detail - care in implementation, demos and communication.

  
  

These signals emerged in the most natural way possible: through conversation, collaboration and shared problem-solving, not through staged questions or trick scenarios.

Why This Matters for both Talent Acquisition and for Participants

For BET Software’s hiring teams, this approach turned the hackathon into a high-fidelity window into how people might behave on the job. Technical scores were still important, but they now sat alongside lived evidence of how someone works with others, navigates uncertainty and carries themselves under pressure. Decisions after the event weren’t based on CVs and code alone; they were grounded in a richer, more balanced picture.

For the engineers taking part, the Secret Shopper layer didn’t feel like a spotlight. Most experienced it as mentoring, conversation and interest in their work. They weren’t being asked to perform polished interview personas; they were building, learning and collaborating in ways that felt natural to them, while the process quietly recognised that effort.

By weaving human-centred hiring and Secret Shoppers into the heart of the weekend, the hackathon did more than measure who could write good code quickly. It surfaced who could contribute to real teams in real conditions – turning a virtual event into a practical, people-first way to spot the kind of talent that makes a long-term difference.

Talent Experience and Brand Moments

From the outside, a hackathon can look like a wall of numbers and screenshots. Inside the weekend, it felt very different. For the engineers, mentors and hiring managers who showed up, this was 36 hours of intense focus, unexpected conversations and small moments that don’t show in a funnel diagram but matter just as much.

The Talent Experience: Learning, Community, Mentorship, Fun

For many participants, the first surprise was how quickly strangers became teammates. Within a few hours, groups that had never met before were sharing repositories, sketching architectures and negotiating priorities as if they’d been working together for weeks. The format demanded it, but the environment supported it: a clear challenge, an accessible virtual space and mentors who were visibly invested.

Throughout the weekend, a few themes kept coming up in feedback:

• Learning and growth

  Engineers spoke about stretching into new tools, getting exposed to different payment flows and watching how other developers approached the same problem. The hackathon felt less like a test and more like a compressed learning sprint – the kind of experience you’d usually only get on the inside of a company.

• Community and connection

  People didn’t just ship code; they found peers. Many described the sense of building alongside “driven people I’d never have met otherwise”, and the energy that comes from solving something hard in good company.

• Mentorship that actually helped

  BET Software mentors weren’t there to police progress; they were there to unblock, challenge and support. Participants called out specific moments where a mentor’s question or suggestion changed the direction of their work, or helped them see a simpler path through a complex problem.

• A surprising amount of fun

  The game-style environment in Gather.town, avatars, rooms, stages, informal walk-ups, added a layer of playfulness that kept the weekend from feeling like a long exam. Comments like “The Gather environment made it feel better than a physical hack” and “The game-style setup was mind-blowing” came up alongside reflections about growth and challenge.

  
  

Taken together, these experiences did more than keep people engaged for a weekend. They created a shared story. Whether or not someone ended up in a formal hiring process afterwards, they left with new skills, new contacts and a clear sense of how BET Software and its partners show up when they invite people into their world.

Employer Brand Moments: Stories People Wanted to Tell

As the weekend wrapped up, that story began to spill outward.

Participants and mentors shared their own recaps: screenshots of the virtual venue, photos of team workspaces, reflections on what they’d learned, shout-outs to teammates and mentors. There were dozens of posts rather than one or two, spread across personal profiles rather than only official brand channels. Comments and reactions followed the same pattern – high engagement where people were telling real, specific stories about their experience.

What stood out wasn’t the volume alone, but the tone:

• Engineers describing the hackathon as one of the most engaging remote experiences they’d had.

• Mentors talking about the satisfaction of seeing teams grow over the 36 hours.

• Teams celebrating their demos, even when they didn’t “win”, because they were proud of what they’d built together.

  
  

For BET Software, these moments did more than boost visibility. They showed the company through the eyes of the people who matter most: the engineers and mentors who had just spent a full weekend inside its culture, tools and ways of working. For Otinga, it reinforced a core belief: when you design talent acquisition as a meaningful experience, employer branding becomes a side effect, not a separate campaign.

The hackathon worked on two levels at once. On the surface, it produced candidates, demos and data. Beneath that, it created an experience people were eager to talk about, an experience that signalled to the market that this is a place where learning, community, mentorship and enjoyment sit alongside serious technical work. That mix is hard to fake in a job ad, but it comes through clearly when people tell the story themselves.

Beyond Hiring, the Impact for Organisations, Participants and the Tech Ecosystem

When you zoom out from the weekend itself, the value of this kind of hackathon becomes easier to see. Yes, there were candidates, demos and data. But the real impact stretches wider into how organisations think about talent, how individuals think about their own growth, and how the broader tech community experiences opportunity.

Impact for Organisations =Better Pipelines, Better Decisions, Repeatable Models

For organisations, the most visible outcome is a richer talent pipeline. Instead of a list of CVs attached to standard assessments, there is a smaller, sharper group of engineers who have:

• Opted into a demanding, time-bound challenge.

• Shown how they behave in real teams, under realistic pressure.

• Left a trail of technical work, demos and soft-skill signals that hiring managers can actually use.

That changes the texture of hiring conversations. Early-stage interviews can be anchored in shared experience, “we saw you handle that payment edge case” or “we watched how your team responded when production broke in the middle of the night sprint”, rather than generic questions. Decisions become less about guesswork and more about what people have already done in a context that resembles real work.

There is also a quieter operational benefit. Once a format like this is designed and proven, it becomes a repeatable asset: a playbook that can be adapted for different roles, regions or themes without reinventing the wheel each time. The same backbone, clear objectives, an AI-powered platform, a virtual venue and committed partners, can support a series of talent acquisition runs rather than a single, isolated event.

For organisations, a well-designed talent hackathon is less about a one-off spike of attention and more about building a sustainable way to meet, understand and select the people who will shape the next wave of products and systems.

Impact for Participants = Skills, Stories and Visibility

For the engineers who took part, the impact showed up in different ways.

Some walked away with direct hiring opportunities. Others left with something more foundational: sharpened skills, new collaborators and a clearer sense of how they show up when the stakes feel real. A weekend like this compresses months of learning into a short, intense window, new tools, new approaches, exposure to different thinking styles, and live feedback from mentors and hiring managers.

There’s also the matter of story. Completing a 36-hour fintech hackathon, shipping a demo and talking publicly about the experience gives participants something concrete to point to in future conversations. It becomes a signal on their profiles, a topic in interviews, a moment in their own narrative: “Here’s what we built; here’s how we worked; here’s what I learned.”

For many, the relationships matter just as much. Teammates, mentors and even fellow competitors become part of a growing network of people who have seen each other work under pressure and still want to stay in touch.

For participants, the value doesn’t begin and end with a potential job. It lives in the skills they practised, the people they met and the confidence that comes from finishing something hard together and being seen while doing it.

Impact for the Tech Ecosystem = Signals and Spaces

Zoom out one level further, and formats like this start to shape the ecosystem they sit in.

A well-run hackathon sends a signal: that there are organisations willing to invest in meaningful, transparent ways for people to engage with them; that mentorship and learning can sit alongside serious technical work; that innovation and talent acquisition don’t have to be separate conversations.

It also creates a space. A space where emerging and experienced engineers can work side by side. A space where technology partners, hiring teams and community members mix in a way that doesn’t happen in standard recruitment flows. A space where people who might never have crossed paths in day-to-day life can build something real together.

Over time, these spaces accumulate. They change how people think about what’s possible in hiring, in collaboration and in their own careers.

Beyond immediate roles and requisitions, the real legacy of this kind of hackathon is cultural: a small but meaningful shift towards a tech ecosystem where opportunity is more visible, learning is built into the way companies meet talent, and “talent acquisition” feels a little more like people building things together and a little less like a one-sided transaction.

Lessons and What Comes Next

By the end of those 36 hours, it was clear that this wasn’t just a different way to run an event. It was a different way to think about talent acquisition: as something people experience together, rather than something that happens to candidates one by one.

A few lessons stand out.

• Design talent acquisition as an experience, not just a pipeline.

  The moment engineers stepped into the hackathon, they weren’t being processed; they were invited into a focused space to build, learn and be seen. Hiring teams, in turn, gained access to people in conditions that looked far closer to real work.

• Let structure and technology make room for human contact.

  The Otinga platform and the virtual venue held the logistics together – applications, screening, scoring, soft-skill signals, so mentors and hiring managers could focus on conversations, not spreadsheets.

• Treat behaviour as a first-class hiring signal.

  Completion, teamwork, coachability, calm under pressure: these surfaced naturally as teams worked through the weekend. When later interviews began, they were anchored in shared experience, not guesswork.

• Build a model you can run again.

  Because the format, tools and roles were designed deliberately, the outcome wasn’t a once-off spike. It became a pattern that can shift to new roles, regions and themes without starting from scratch.

  
  

Those lessons loop us back to the three questions that sat quietly under this story:

• Can a virtual hackathon act as a serious talent acquisition engine, not just a branding moment?

• What kinds of signals about people emerge when they build together under pressure, that never show up in a CV or standard interview loop?

• How do you design that experience so it works for everyone involved – the organisation, the hiring team and the engineers who choose to take part?

  
  

In this case, the answers were practical. The hackathon narrowed a wide pool into a smaller, high-intent group of engineers who had already shown how they work. It surfaced behavioural signals - ownership, persistence, teamwork, openness to feedback – that no static assessment can reliably capture. And it did all of this in a format participants described as meaningful, fair and unexpectedly enjoyable.

Looking ahead, the building blocks are reusable: a clear challenge, an AI-powered innovation platform, a human virtual venue and the right partners. Rearranged, they can support data teams, platform teams, security teams; new regions and new communities. The specifics will change. The principle holds.

At Otinga, there’s a simple belief at the heart of this: to innovate is human. That applies as much to how organisations hire as to what they build. When talent acquisition is treated as a space for purposeful innovation, with clear guardrails, real work and respect for people’s time, it stops being a sequence of hoops and starts becoming a place where organisations and engineers meet each other at their best.

Hiring doesn’t have to orbit around the work. With the right design, it can happen inside it, in focused moments where people come together, build something that matters and, in the process, show exactly who they are.