AI Insights

Two days, dozens of ideas, one unified goal: This is the spring Hackathon with Reed.co.uk. 

Together with their long-term partner, the teams at Godel and Reed.co.uk joined forces for a recent Eurovision-themed Hackathon, spanning across Reed.co.uk’s HQ and Godel’s Wroclaw office. The goal was to create innovative solutions that would help enable Reed.co.uk’s mission of improving lives through work and help drive value for customers. 

Recruitment is ripe for innovation, which led to Reed.co.uk partnering with Godel in 2017. The partnership has enabled increased capacity, flexibility and resource for various areas of the business to improve the overall experience for Reed.co.uk’s customers. The Godel team has consistently demonstrated its skills, with engineers providing support in multiple areas for Reed.co.uk, and as a result, the partnership has grown. 

The Hackathon Challenge: Rethinking the Candidate Experience 

The Hackathon was the perfect way to collaborate, empower people’s ideas and explore new and exciting future projects, with the ultimate goal of discovering new ways to enable Reed.co.uk’s mission to drive value for users. 

Organising and running a hackathon across two locations was challenging, but was made significantly easier due to the high level of engagement and willingness to collaborate from our product engineering team, of which Godel plays a significant part.”

Luke Orrell, Head of Engineering & Quality Assurance at Reed.co.uk 

Understanding how improving the hiring journey was central. The teams had to consider the value or benefit they were looking to deliver, the solution, and how they would expect to implement the solution. 

In order to present a well-rounded solution, teams were encouraged to include the following: 

• High-level estimates 

• Sales or go-to-market messaging 

• Supporting data 

Exploring AI-Powered Hiring 

During the hackathon, teams proposed a range of innovative AI-driven ideas aimed at transforming the recruitment process. 

The Hackathon was a great opportunity to explore brand new AI technologies and discover how to apply them to Reed use cases. Using AI enabled us to create something genuinely useful with a “vibe coding” approach. It was great to see that it’s possible to build a working proof of concept in just two days and validate exciting ideas quickly.”

Robert Kostrzewski, Senior Data Scientist at Godel Technologies 

What’s in store for Recruitment’s Next Chapter? 

From innovative new features to internal improvements, the hackathon was a great reminder of what the teams can achieve when working together, building a strong bridge of collaboration. The partnership between Godel and Reed.co.uk and diverse teams brought fresh perspectives to shared problems to the table. Events like hackathons play a pivotal role in shaping the future of recruitment by providing a dynamic, real-time platform for individuals to demonstrate their skills, creativity, and problem-solving abilities outside the confines of traditional resumes and interviews.  

In addition to the high standard of output from each team, which was consistently excellent, the building of relationships through this level of effective collaboration will set us up well for our future goals and objectives within our partnership.”   

Luke Orrell, Head of Engineering & Quality Assurance at Reed.co.uk

Hackathons foster continued collaboration beyond the event itself, encouraging participants to build lasting networks, share knowledge, and co-create solutions. This spirit of teamwork and innovation lays the groundwork for a more agile, inclusive, and forward-thinking talent ecosystem.