Team SweeBoHiar emerged the winning team beating 29 others at the annual Hackathon organised by the Developer Student Club (DSC) at NUS, an incubating club under the School of Computing, in collaboration with Conjunct Consulting.
The team chose to work on the challenge statement posted by Access SG, a non-profit organisation dedicated to providing career exposure opportunities to secondary school students from underserved backgrounds and educational streams, because they could empathise with the youths who lacked a listing of past experiences on their resumes.
Joshen explained: “Three of our team members, including myself, have not had internships related to computer science before. This makes our resumes look quite empty. When drafting my own resume, I was quite worried as the only work experience I had at that time was my National Service commitments. Hence, I could empathise with jobseekers who faced the similar challenge of reflecting their understanding and knowledge of industries in their resumes.”
Juay Hee elaborated on the importance of addressing the challenge statement: “Resumes have always been the go-to process for recruitment, and it is important to raise awareness that this long-standing tradition of only assessing past experiences stated on the resume is not foolproof.”
To do so, they had to come up with a solution that was technically feasible and of value to both jobseekers and recruiters, which was a challenge. “Throughout the ideation process, I always asked my team, ‘Okay, it seems feasible. What’s the catch?’. What we needed were not only good ideas, but also reasons why this good idea would not work. Only then could we further fine tune our idea, and ensure that we have backup strategies for different scenarios,” Joshen shared.
The finished product of their hard work was a mobile application prototype that allows jobseekers to set up a 1-minute interview with recruiters. ‘Elevate’, the name of the application, was inspired by the elevator pitch, a presentation format in which individuals present their ideas concisely and persuasively within a short amount of time.
Shawn Low, who sat on the judging panel and has co-founded a few non-profits, saw ‘Elevate’ as a potentially disruptive recruiting solution for companies seeking great sales / CX talent. “By enabling time-boxed auditions for these roles, it encourages employers to look beyond paper qualifications to assess a candidate’s likelihood of success, and unlocks a much bigger pool of candidates for screening. The originality of this idea was refreshing and I would be most intrigued to see where the team can take it.”
Jeremy Au, an experienced venture capitalist who was also one of the judges, described the proposal as “out-of-the-box thinking with solid technical execution to back it up”.
Amelia Yeow, the lead of DSC, found SweeBoHiar’s proposal unique “because it somewhat upends the current recruitment and internship search process. This might be helpful in overcoming the current catch-22 that fresh graduates or students face, where they want to find internships/jobs for experience, but to do so, they need experience.”
The hackathon was a meaningful experience for the team to be in the shoes of their target audience. For Brendan, the biggest challenge in the Hackathon was finding time to meet amidst their busy schedules. They managed to overcome this by setting clear agendas and allocating work based on individual strengths and skillsets. Seeing the efforts other teams put in have inspired them to continue honing their skills. For Kieran, this experience gave them more confidence to participate in future hackathons.
Moving forward, the team will look out for more hackathons and innovation challenges, with a focus on brainstorming solutions for real-world issues. We wish them all the best as they continue to do good using technology.
| About Hack for Good |
| Running in its second year, Hack for Good is an annual Hackathon organised by the Developer Student Club at NUS. The month-long event attracted 30 submissions to five challenge statements provided by four non-profit organisations, one of which being the NUS Office of Student Affairs. |
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Office of Student Affairs, Community Engagement
