Hiring the right tech talent has become a massive challenge for companies globally. Most employees today can work from anywhere in the world and do not hesitate to pursue better opportunities. Organizations experiencing rapid attrition are coming to understand that money isn’t the only motivator for today’s workforce. Staff engagement and employee value proposition have become equally crucial for talent acquisition, management, and retention.
Apart from employee experience, modern tech talent is also eager to meet their contemporaries, network, and grow through learning from each other. However, only a handful of organizations can offer a nurturing and challenging environment, allowing their tech talent to evolve and improve themselves.
In recent years, hackathons and ideathons have emerged as a powerful way for organizations to engage, innovate and hire better talent. Such coding/business challenges and competitions can help companies crowdsource the brightest ideas, foster internal innovation and align ideas to strategic goals effortlessly.
Hackathons are a promotional tactic for organizations and boost internal and external engagement (with customers and campus talent). In addition, they allow you to hire the best talent from all over the world through an effective assessment of their problem-solving, team-building, and critical-thinking skills.
Using large-scale online hackathons, organizations can manage and assess thousands of participants efficiently at a very low cost, improving brand visibility and solving real-world problems. However, only a handful of platforms offer organizations the flexibility and resourcefulness to conduct such competitions.
This review will focus on Xathon – a highly customizable and feature-rich hackathon and ideathon platform (from the house of Mercer | Mettl) that helps organizations create, configure and conduct competitions online for various purposes. This innovative platform brings participants, assessors, and administrators together to recognize/ reward talent, solve problems or meet business objectives through a simulated gamified experience.
Through this review, we will cover the following points:
- Introduction to Xathon
- Key Features of Xathon
- Our Final Verdict
So let’s begin, shall we?
Introduction to Xathon
Xathon is a hackathon platform that helps organizations/institutions perform talent acquisition, management, and assessment tasks with great ease and accuracy. The platform helps you curate events to attract the best talent with ideas and skills that can revolutionize your organization and help meet its business objectives.
Xathon can be used to conceptualize and create events like coding hackathons, ideathons, and case study competitions as per your organizational goals. You can easily invite participants, conduct assessments, and analyze their performance using this highly secure and flexible platform.
Xathon empowers participants, administrators, and judges with a range of helpful features and comes with inbuilt dashboards. Using Xathon, organizations can create idea competitions (ideathons) and create idea prototypes effortlessly.
Xathon allows you to create different rounds where ideas get filtered, voted, rated, and shortlisted by judges after admins approve them for assessment. The application also features discussion forums, live leaderboards, and automated reminders, which further improve the efficacy of hackathons.
Xathon enables you to design virtual events with assorted auditoriums, embedded surveys, and live Q & A sessions and lets participants communicate and network with each other. In addition, the platform offers superior customer support at all stages of hackathon events (i.e., pre-event, post-events, and during events). Finally, it provides a unique virtual AI-powered 3D Finale Hosting to emulate real-life hackathon final events and boosts your company’s branding.
Xathon seamlessly integrates with Coding simulator, which is a part of Mercer|Mettl’s assessment backbone. This allows the application to support over 100 job roles – something that is lacking from most platforms. This enables you to choose and hire candidates for many diverse technical positions. Additionally, the platform can easily be integrated into any hackathon stage or used (after test completion) for talent acquisition and management purposes.
Xathon is already being used by some of the world’s biggest brands, including Reckitt Benckiser, Indus Valley Partners, and CGI. Additionally, coming from the house of Mercer | Mettl, the platform already has a rich community of over 2 lac developers that you can easily engage with. What’s more, Mercer | Mettl’s assessment armada contains a library of the highest number of (1,00,000+) technical questions that you can make use of.
Impressed already? We haven’t discussed the key features yet.
Key Features of Xathon
1. Discussion Forums
Xathon offers discussion forums that allow participants, support teams, and mentors to collaborate in real-time. Apart from audio/video calls and file exchanges, participants can also collaborate via a dedicated Slack channel. Xathon also allows you to improve your approach to hackathons by embedding feedback mechanisms and idea-sharing on social media.
2. Live Leaderboards
Xathon offers live leaderboards for participants, allowing them to track the performance of other teams in real-time. Live leaderboards and rewards structures improve competitiveness and provide an overview of scores received in all stages of hackathons. The platform also supports ‘voice-based prioritization’ of ideas, enabling assessors to filter/shortlist ideas much faster. 
3. Automated Reminders
Xathon enables judges and administrators to automate their daily tasks through automated reminders and mailers. Such reminder emails can be customized to ensure better participation and facilitate better collaboration among participants. Additionally, the platform allows experts to mentor and guide participants and form teams that can be alerted together with updates.
4. Insightful Dashboards
With Xathon, assessors and administrators get access to numerous dashboards and evaluation portals that they can use for better assessment of performances. Additionally, the platform enables admins to configure their preferred rating type for each round/stage and share their feedback directly with candidates.
Xathon’s dashboards provide advanced filters to view data across regions, business units, etc. So not only can you track participation and registrations in real-time, but you can also view selection and rejection statistics at all stages of an event.
5. Personalized Branding
Xathon allows you to create a dedicated web page for each ideathon and hackathon on their platform with all information about events. In addition, it helps create targeted digital marketing and branding strategies for specific user groups, countries, languages, student communities, and social media channels.
Xathon enables you to optimize your web pages and email campaigns to maximize your reach. The application also lets you analyze how such campaigns are performing on social media and offers web traffic and registration analysis.
6. Powerful Reports
Xathon offers customizable post-event reports with real-time actionable insights to improve your decision-making. The reports help you capture feedback and critical outcomes of every round in the event and evaluate factors like engagement level, location-wise participation, participation rate, etc. With Xathon, you can predefine test cases so that submissions by candidates can be graded automatically. Moreover, it offers real-time code analytics for quick evaluation of their effectiveness.
7. Campus Connect/Student Engagement
Xathon helps you choose from the best campuses according to your recruitment needs through a dedicated campus intelligence solution. Its nationwide (2000+) campus partnerships help you meet specific recruitment guidelines and manage virtual communications with campus coordinators. This not only smoothens the registration and shortlisting process but also ensures better management of virtual events.
In addition to the above features, Xathon’s role-based simulator evaluates the problem-solving abilities for a multitude of programming roles and supports multiple technologies. Furthermore, the platform offers a range of cognitive tools to assess personality, cognitive acumen, and behavioral traits. Additionally, it provides state-of-the-art security (ISO 27001 & ISO 9001 Certified) features with GDPR compliance to protect your company and participants’ data.
Our Final Verdict
Xathon is a highly customizable and feature-packed platform that makes it easy to create, conduct, monitor, and assess hackathons and ideathons. In addition, it allows you to recognize and reward tech talent and improve your marketing efforts with intuitive insights and insightful dashboards.
Xathon offers several industry-leading features and allows you to conduct hackathons and ideathons with great ease and accuracy. Considering the wide assortment of features, ease of use, and flexibility, we are inclined to give the platform a ‘Perfect Ten’ in our ratings, hoping that it would help countless organizations innovate, engage, and hire better in the years to come.
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