Changing the Game for Employee Engagement: LinkedIn’s Non-Technical Hackathon

This month we hosted our first ever non-technical hackathon at LinkedIn focusing on Human Resources. We called it LinkedIn Festival: A Non-Technical Hackathon – and it was a huge success! Over 150 interns from companies across the Bay Area participated, and the energy level and breadth of ideas generated from each team was inspiring.

The theme for our hackathon was “Engagement.” Participants were tasked with creating a three-minute pitch for an innovative idea that addresses a business challenge or opportunity related to the theme of employee engagement. This goal of our engagement theme was to bring together many different aspects of an employee lifecycle and to encourage thinking around inclusion and diversity.

We weren’t trying to ‘fix’ Human Resource, rather we were aspiring to move the needle, spark imagination around talent engagement, and heighten the awareness/cool factor of HR. We wanted interns from all backgrounds to go beyond their comfort zones and explore some of the unique opportunities in HR that they never knew existed - opportunities to treat people beautifully, as I like to say.

Our judging panel for the final ideas was comprised of myself, Ellyn Shook, CHRO of Accenture, John Boudreau, USC Professor of Management and Organization, Leighanne Levensaler, SVP Products at Workday, and Steve Johnson, VP User Experience at LinkedIn.

PHOTO: Team at work... around midnight... :)

Below is an overview of the top three winning teams:

Third place: Team HackHR (Mia Beinhorn, Dana Mun, Jon Miguel Jara, David Giongco, and Mallika Sathe)

This group identified a major problem facing millennial new-hires in the workplace: slow feedback from managers. This group suggested 360 degree feedback with a twist – feedback that is only available once one person has submitted feedback for the other via a software plug-in. this created s sense of ‘Fear of Missing Out’ (FOMO) – a millennial vernacular and behavior that quickens feedback.

I loved that this was relevant to how that demographic thinks about feedback and I also loved the real time nature of the feedback loop – something that every employee could and would benefit from in the workplace.

Second place: Team Start[in] from the Bottom (Andrew Atwong, Keving Cunanan, Cathryn Herbst, Varun Puri, and Jennifer Smith)

This group sought to increase employee engagement by creating an ‘Impact Dashboard’ which allows employees to graphically see the impact they are making on the vision of a company. The ‘Impact Dashboard’ is a scalable tool that engagement employees with the long-term company vision, motivating them to increase performance that can drive employee engagement and business results. Who doesn’t want to know how they have impacted their company?   Another great idea.

First place: Team Infinity (Lakshman Somasundaram and Summer Wu)

This team developed and presented ‘Infinite,’ a strategy and personalized mobile app that maximizes intern engagement through machine learning and increases the conversion of interns to full-time hires. The machine learning-based mobile app allows interns to give and receive feedback from management, learn about opportunities that are related to their interests, and connect with employees and other interns who can help them achieve their long-term goals. This also helps companies who invest in intern programs to improve their success rate in placing those interns into meaningful full-time work upon graduation. 

Besides the creative ideas above, we had a team create a way to connect with friends at work through like interests as part of a new hire onboarding process called CHUMS. The concept behind CHUMS is that when you have friends at work, you are more productive, there’s higher engagement, and you’re more likely to refer others to the company. Not a bad ROI if you ask me!

Our next steps are to broaden the audience and try this internationally. We will continue to experiment. Just opening up to new ideas and perspectives is so engaging.

With that said - I would like to sincerely thank all of the interns, judges and volunteers that came out as well as all of those that supported us in our first ever HR Hackathon! As I said earlier – It was fun!

Photo:  LinkedIn HR Interns and "Wall of Hack-Teams"