Why this wandering LinkedIn went from hiring to training to hackathons

Subhendu Panigrahi, the Chalta Phirta (wandering) LinkedIn, has come full circle. When Tech in Asia last caught up with him 10 months ago, this IIT Kharagpur grad had just pivoted from hiring talent for startups to training people for jobs in demand. His startup VentureHire had morphed into Venturesity.

Now, Panigrahi has turned again to finding the right talent for tech companies big and small. But instead of going back to the tech job board he had started with, Venturesity has moved forward to a smarter, hackathon-based hiring model.

And yesterday, the Bangalore-based startup announced its first round of funding. It raised US$250,000 from angel investors, including RedBus founder Phanindra Sama. Other biggies in the list of investors include serial entrepreneurs and prolific angels Jay Sethuram, Hemant Kanakia, Joshua Bornstein, Phanish Puranam, and Ravi Trivedi.

Panigrahi explains to Tech in Asia how the changes in the Venturesity model came about:

When we were doing hiring initially, we found that there was not enough talent, and so we started the training platform. But it takes a lot of time to train people to industry standards and startups are scaling up too fast. That’s how we realized that hackathons are a good way to find talent who were industry ready.

Are you ready for a challenge?

Venturesity lets companies post “challenges” mimicking real working scenarios, instead of boring job descriptions. Jobseekers form teams, either on their own or on the Venturesity community forum, to tackle the challenges. These hackathons enable employers to look beyond resumes and interviews to candidates’ product development capabilities and team dynamics.

“In most hackathons, it is the team that gets hired. It is like a 48-hour-old startup getting acqui-hired,” says Panigrahi.

Apart from helping participants to form teams, Venturesity also sends them video tutorials and other learning resources to let them come well prepared for the hackathons. Its experience with education content thus comes handy. “The learning component is still there, but more as a challenge-based model than course-based learning,” says Panigrahi.

Venturesity is now partnering with Microsoft to curate learning materials for the hackathons. The partnership followed a hackathon to get people interested in Microsoft’s MOOCs (massive open online courses). “What we stopped doing is churning out content on our own to focus on the hackathons,” says Panigrahi.