Finding Right Talent through Hackathons

Rajat Shahi, Founder – Hackmania

HackMania is a product development company which conducts hackathons to find the right talent for companies. It also helps companies hire tech talent seamlessly in an easy and effective manner. The team is a bunch of startup enthusiasts and industry veterans collaborated to take up HackMania forward and they visualise building the future World with some great products.

What is HackMania Technology? What is the issue that the venture is trying to address and what makes you confident that it is a winning proposition.

“What do you do to hire good tech talent for your company? Let me answer that for you – you go to an HR Consultancy or an online job portal, they give you a cluttered unfiltered database and then your poor HR Manager has to go through all those resumes to find out the right guy and then what you do? You spend days/weeks/months finding the right fit and did I mention, shitload of money?

According to the Manpower group 58% of companies find it extremely difficult to hire tech talent. We are here to DISRUPT the tech recruiting industry using our product Hackerbay, a product crafted by hackers for the hackers.

Problem: We’ve 3 major sectors on which we are focusing:

Companies: The main pain point of the companies are going through numerous databases from various job posting websites and HR Consultancies, all of this comes at a cost, well very expensive costs. One resume on any reputed job listing website costs you INR 25 and for filling 1 position it costs you at least 80000 and a lot of time and resources, we all have heard about the great saying “Time is Money”

Colleges: Colleges have the problem of finding the right connection in companies for which Placement Officer has to work tirelessly and of course the skill development of their students.

Hackers: As a hacker myself I can vouch for this as this provides me a skill validation process and also helps me in learning various programme.

Solution: Hackerbay comes to your rescue. We provide a unique platform that redefines the way tech hiring is done, it helps companies to hire developers, and did I mention validated developers. We also help in conducting company and college hackathons on our platform by providing tech support to host the hackathon by providing platform as a service.”

What was the key factor/s that led you to take the plunge?

“The key factor was that we saw a huge gap and a lot of competitive advantage in the market which made us go with the product.”

Where did you meet your other co-founders / business partners? Please describe each one briefly.

“Prashanth my Co-Founder & CTO is a former MSP (Microsoft Student Partner) and he used to give lot of sessions on programming in his college, I being a coder myself wanted to learn something cool and I met him first at one of his lectures since then we have participated in multiple competitions together and founded this company.

Major Sunil Shetty is my school alumni (20 years senior to me) we met at our school reunion where we both were in the organising committee, he was really impressed by my dedication towards a work assigned and believed in the idea a lot, and hence he became my co-founder & CSO.”

How did you manage the initial capital?

“One of our co-founders, Major Sunil Shetty has invested initial INR 5 Lacs he invested because he believed in the idea, hence it’s a bootstrapped startup.”

What were the first 90 days like?

“First 90 days were rollercoaster ride, we iterated the idea and business model almost every other week but the belief in our team was immense and that’s why we are going on after almost 1.5 years.”

Have you managed to raise any funding — angel / seed, etc?

“No, we’ve not raised any money apart from the initial 5 Lacs invested by one of our co-founders, we are a bootstrapped and self-sustainable company, whatever money we will need will be for scaling up only.”

What is the revenue stream & profitability?

“We charge companies on every successful hire and charge a platform fee whenever they organises a hackathon on our platform, we’ve generated around INR 5 lacs in revenue. We broke even just a week back. Normally we are projecting INR 2 Crores in revenue next year and around 60% profits.”

What is your guiding philosophy when it comes to doing business?

“Patience, perseverance and passion are the pillar of any business.”

Where do you see yourself 3 years from now?

“We see ourselves offering product as a service in over 3 countries, 5000 colleges, 5 Million users and around 2000 companies.”