The goal of an HR hackathon is to create a better way “to see the world through an employee’s eyes,” writes Jeanne Meister in an article for Forbes. Meister is a partner with Future Workplace, an HR advisory and research firm. “I have profiled hackathons at LinkedIn to better understand the experience of a college intern, and at Cisco to ‘break’ big and small HR practices and deliver a more memorable experience. What both of these hackathons have in common is the forward thinking HR leaders are moving outside of the HR silo and using design thinking to re-imagine HR.”
Jet.com, a subsidiary of Walmart, had created a hackathon to bolster the job candidate experience and to better match potential hires with the ideal openings. For Jet.com this meant the talent experience team working with HR, software and product designers, software developers, aspiring students, and key executives to devise a solution. “And that is what happened,” Meister notes. “The winning solution, named Casy, leverages machine learning to match a job description with key words in an applicant’s resume. Plus, Casy works for not only Jet.com applicants but for anyone looking for a job.”