It’s not every day that one gets a chance to see so many great minds under one roof. The Startup Mashup held in the capital on Saturday saw 200 engineers creating interesting solutions for some of the most popular digital startup companies in India.
Organised by MyRefers, a referral-based online jobs marketplace, the event attracted talent as well as popular startups such as mobile payment gateway companies PayU and Mobikwik apart from Gaadi.com, Groupon.com, Limetray.com, 91mobiles.com and Socialcops.com. Additionally business-to-business platforms such as Targeting Mantra and Acquia participated in the day-long event.
Speaking about the idea of starting a recruitment drive for startups, Lalit Bhagia, CEO, MyRefers, said, “The idea came after I had a conversation with a business journalist who asked me the difference in recruitment procedure followed by an online startup company and a big corporate. My reply was simple that startups always look out for talents that have the potential to scale up the business.
Through the mashup programme we want to bring the talent and the companies under one roof, where both can join forces to create something extraordinary.”
Titled ‘Hackathon’, the event also had various companies’ chief executives making a presentation to the participants providing them with reasons to join their respective companies.
“Groupon India is all set to become an independent product in the next eight to nine months. So we are looking for the right kind of talent that will help us create a brand new product serving the needs of Indian consumers,” said Ankur Warikoo, CEO, Groupon India.
The event was divided into six different challenges namely, user experience challenge, codeathon that is, coding for the web, user interface challenge, data science challenge, codeathon for mobile and product management challenge. Each participant was free to select a challenge.
At the end of the day while challenges such as data science, codeathon for web and mobile and product management had five winners, challenges like user interface only had one winner and user experience had two winners.
Each winner walked away with a job offer apart from a trophy and a certificate, Goqii watch and coupons worth R5,000 from Groupon.
Bhagia, who seemed happy with response the recruitment drive generated, plans to turn it into an annual event from next year. “We would like to conduct similar Tech Mashup every year in other big cities as well,” he added.