The big winners in Eightfold’s customer Hackathon: Eightfold customers
AI tools for succession planning, career management, candidate experience, and diversity were recognized this month at a hackathon held by Eightfold both in the company’s global headquarters as well as at “Eightfold Nalanda,” the global center of excellence, research, and innovation in AI in India.
The global hackathon, which drew customer attendees from Asia, Europe, and the U.S., was designed to harness the spirit of innovation among Eightfold and its customers to generate new ideas for using AI to hire, develop, and keep talent.
The winning ideas included a concept called Succession Planning for Everyone; extensions for the personalized Talent Experience; a Career Explorer; and features to further boost diversity hiring. “We saw unique ideas last week — some that can make an impact immediately, and others that can shape the future of Eightfold’s AI,” said Eightfold Co-CEO & Founder Ashotosh Garg.
Customers take part
This hackathon is part of an ongoing series of hackathons held at Eightfold’s offices. Customers and employees develop ideas to enhance Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence Platform.
“What’s really fascinating is watching ideas come from customers and seeing them come to life,” says Eightfold Vice President of Solutions Engineering Jason Gray, one of the hosts of the hackathon.
In the morning, the 12 teams divided up and brainstormed, focusing on what could be built that would improve the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform and make it even more powerful for both job candidates and companies. The spirited discussions in the morning tackled questions like: How we can build new technology while respecting people’s privacy and comply with the law? How will the proposed solution integrate with tools such as an ATS? How will the AI work if someone’s using a smartphone, or has no resume?
Then, hackers spent the remainder of the day coding the ideas, creating working prototypes by the end of the day to pitch to the judges. At night, winners were crowned.
Past hackathons have yielded new Talent Intelligence Platform capabilities that have been incorporated in the Eightfold product, including:
Skills Validation and Skills Inference
Automatic email follow-ups with more than two emails in the cadence
The new Eightfold Talent Acquisition Analytics launched this fall
Talent Transformation workflows
Mike Thiel, global talent acquisition program manager at Micron Technology, said he hadn’t experienced a hackathon in a customer-participation format like this. “Customers basically help create the product roadmap,” he says. “That’s an amazing value-add to the strategic alliance.”
This is the third Eightfold hackathon of 2019, and if you are an Eightfold customer, you also can participate in an Eightfold customer hackathon next year.
