Developers are in increasing demand, a fact that doesn’t look like it will change anytime soon. This means that the higher the demand for top tech talent, the more efficient you need to be with your sourcing in order to attract the best coding talent. One of the best ways to do this is to organize a programming contest. If done right, it can be a great way to attract devs to your conference and pick up qualified candidates to funnel into your recruiting strategy.
Programming contests – who are they for?
Programming contests are used by conference organizers but also by software houses and IT companies.
The benefits of holding a programming contest
A programming contest benefits everybody involved. From conference organizers to sponsors and participants, a programming contest bestows credibility while connecting the most skilled devs with IT employers.
How a conference organizer benefits
As a conference organizer, you know that your programming conference needs to stand out. This is the only way you can attract and engage not only devs but also sponsors and partners. A programming contest is a great way to get the right people to notice your event. They:
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Drive engagement
Developers like being challenged with real-life programming problems. They enjoy putting their programming skills into action, trying their hardest to challenge themselves and prove their skills in the company of their peers.
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Attract partners and sponsors
Companies are always looking for great developers. By organising a contest, you can present your conference and its partners as being developer-friendly. A contest can be a great way to discover which programmers excel at certain skills. You can then pass on to your partners and sponsors the profiles of the candidates that they are hunting for, adding a ton of extra value.
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Grow the conference
The right programming contest makes your conference stand out, attracting developers (and the partners/sponsors who follow them) as you bring them additional value.
How an IT company benefits
As an IT company, you are on a constant search for skilled developers. Programming contests can be a great tool to incorporate into your sourcing strategy and strengthen your employer branding.
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Recruitment
Getting developers’ attention is not easy. A challenging programming contest can attract the interest of developers and put you in touch with the best of the talent pool. It can be used during a conference or even as a part of your online sourcing campaign.
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Strengthen employer branding
As an IT company, you need to make sure that you have brand recognition with the candidates you want to hire. This is because they want to be able to evaluate all of your initiatives before they decide whether or not they want to work for you. A programming contest that is based on real-life problems is a great way to strengthen your company’s positive employer branding by giving them a window on the kind of work you do.
What puts DevSkiller’s programming contest in a class by itself?
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Real-life programming challenges
Programmers find a programming challenge that looks and feels like the actual work they do, based on what they do in their everyday life. No imaginary problems or algorithmic tasks, just a real-life programming task to solve.
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It puts programming skills into action
Devs can show their programming skills in action and challenge themselves in order to receive the best possible results. It is super motivating to do programming challenges that make sense and let them see where they rank with others.
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A developer-friendly environment
Devs are allowed and even encouraged to use the tools they do in their everyday life e.g. frameworks, libraries, databases and external sources along with their favourite IDE to show their real value.
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Flexibility in usage
We give contest organizers a lot of flexibility as far as coding challenges are concerned. You can create your own programming task with help from us or let us do it all for you. It is up to you.
What can DevSkiller do for your programming contest?
- Provide a Landing page informing the public about the programming contest
- Provide the Infrastructure to conduct the contest
- Help you create challenges
- Prepare programming challenges that have been built by DevSkiller experts
- Deliver the results of the top devs and give feedback to participants concerning their results
- Prepare general statistics about the results achieved by devs
Case study – Devoxx Poland
What’s Devoxx Poland about
Devoxx Poland is the biggest Java conference in Poland. It’s a part of the Devoxx family (Antwerp, Paris, London, Krakow, Casablanca e San Jose) which welcomes over 12.000 Devoxxians annually! Devoxx is a conference by developers for developers.
When: 21-23.06.2017
Where: ICE Krakow Congress Centre
Participants: 2500 Devoxxians + 600K developers online, representing 20 countries
Speakers: 144
During 3 days, 2.500 Devoxxians from 20 different countries attend Devoxx Poland including 100 speakers and another 600K developers enjoy the presentations online.
“Devoxx Poland used DevSkiller’s programming contest to create a competition, engagement and a bit of fun during the conference. The many devs that took this coding challenge really appreciated it, as it was based on real-life programming problems. It made our event memorable and exciting.
What was really great about the DevSkiller contest was that the devs played against themselves, trying to push their skills to the limit to get the best possible result, rather than simply beat the other contestants.
I would highly recommend DevSkiller to programming conference organizers who wish to make their events more attractive not only for programmers but also for event partners.”
Grzegorz Duda-Dexoxx Poland
Contest participants
“Here are the two things that I liked the most about the contest and the DevSkiller platform:
- The problem which I had to solve wasn’t some imaginary problem, it rather seemed to be real-life challenge that I could solve for some real business. I also liked that it wasn’t focused only on writing an algorithm that would solve the problem, but that it also needed to fit code that was already there.
- I really loved the chance to work using my own IDE on the job. It is not possible on other platforms like this, as far as I know. Developers deprived of their tools cannot be efficient.”
Łukasz Opaluch
“My overall feelings are positive. The challenge was interesting, and it successfully revealed my deficiency in the Java 8 stream API.
I loved how it was possible to do all the coding in my preferred IDE, only having to push it to DevSkiller for analysis. It is definitely more convenient than using online code editors.”
Jan Dziekan
“It was really fun to play around with the task. I’d say the whole idea is really nice, as it gives us (the developers) a way to challenge ourselves and our abilities. The task was well-constructed, and the instruction was quite descriptive too. I really liked the whole idea of implementing certain methods to match the documentation and the unit tests. Also, the ability to clone a git repository and work on the solution in my own IDE is really great, and it allowed me to focus on the actual task rather than getting to know the web-based editor. Huge thumbs-up for this one!
I really like how DevSkiller works! You can tell from the beginning that it was made with developers in mind and I believe that coding tasks like this could make the remote recruiting process very effective for a company.”
Maciej Kucharek
