We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Angela Chan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Angela below.
Angela, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.
Hackathons International prides itself in revolutionizing the recruiting industry. Through exciting Hackathon experiences, we enable tech companies to locate and specifically select top talent from all over the globe.
Traditional recruiting agencies rely heavily on receiving resumes from applicants. Often, it is hard to validate the skill sets and strengths of everyone in their database. Are the people who apply for jobs even real?
Hackathons International provides a more streamlined approach for hiring managers to assess and evaluate top-tire candidates. One of core missions is to craft an end-to-end experience for the purpose of identifying the best talent for each organization and their respective teams.
Our method has jettisoned the archaic long-interview processes which usually takes weeks, if not, months to arrange and conclude.
Traditionally, there are 4 key steps to harnessing a job:
Interview with the technical recruiter
Interview with hiring manager
Coding assessment
Interview with team members
plus the time screen resumes, arrange and find times for these meetings and beyond!
Our streamlined approach demonstrates a strong correlation in candidates that are propelled into a final-round interview after participating in one weekend event with Hackathons International.
Welcome to the new way of recruiting…
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
Hello, I’m Angela Bee Chan – Founder and CEO of Hackathons International or otherwise known as the Queen of Hackathons.
Whilst I was working for Cancer Council NSW Australia it came to my attention that there are
a lot of opportunities to use technology to better support both patients and their respective families. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I needed to do, but I was certain there was something more that could be done!
A friend of mine told me about a hackathon which her friend was running and assured me that after a weekend of participation, I would find other like-minded individuals, learn more about technological advancements, and upskill my business knowledge. She was absolutely correct! Each person I met had something to give, and we were all passionate changemakers. This was in 2012.
This event was pivotal in my growth, I was fascinated in what I was learning and participated in around 30 Hackathons over the next 3 years. To me, this was a free education which would help my growth and I started to entertain the idea of passing this knowledge and experience on to others. As I reflect on my past experiences, I think the most important aspect of these weekend adventures is how they allowed me to think more creatively, work on my skills, and show off what I could deliver in a short period of time. My experiences in these events even helped me obtain my dream job at Schneider Electric as the Head of Innovation in the Pacific Zone.
In 2014, I put my ideas of uniting and elevating the Hackathon community into motion and formed ‘Hackathons Australia’. Over the next several years, I directly organized and participated in almost a thousand Hackathons. After continuously building on my fundamentals and expanding my knowledge of successfully running Hackthons, in 2020 I made the decision to move to the US and created Hackathons International.
Currently, we primarily focus on assisting tech organizations in selecting and recruiting top-tier talent. Our understanding of todays tech talent shortage has recentered our focus on specifically reaching out to diverse community groups while simultaneously upskilling individuals to better prepare them in obtaining their future dream job.
Technology reaches all aspects of the globe, and we are offering a new and innovative way of recruitment for tech companies.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
..Hackathons Australia was my side hustle. It was my dream to apply what I had learned to help others in Australia, the US, and eventually everyone on a global scale.
Initially, back in 2014, we started out as a Facebook group. However, one weekend in December of that year, we decided to create an event titled ‘Hacking Hackathons Australia’. To our surprise, after just 2 hours, we had 150 people express interest in attending our event!
It was during this moment, when I knew we had to do something more to grow our project in a positive direction. During this time, I started to do customer interviews to better define the needs of our customers. I discovered that our customers were not aware of how adaptable the landscape of technology had become. Therefore, I started developing and implementing the core values of what was required for a true ‘Hackathon’ experience.
Since 2014, I’ve maintained a full-time job and even though every organization has supported me along the way, I am thankful my managers at Schneider Electric Australia always have. In fact, the executives asked me to ‘create my own role’ gave me the opportunity to utilize my experiences at Hackathons to foster a culture of innovation and general new go-to-market channels for optimal growth.
In comparison, the Australian market is very small, meaning my move to the US has opened many doors for me. In Australia the business is not commercially established as well as it has been in the US. In the US there is much more opportunity to build and grow this business into what it is today.
When it comes to business, I have the #YOLO (you only live once) mindset, along with #FLEARNing (have fun whilst learning). Money comes and goes, while meaningful experiences accelerate personal growth and learning. Luckily, I recognized this early on with my business mindset and have had to make difficult but appropriate decisions, even when it sometimes felt uncomfortable.
And yes, there were times when I’ve had too much on my plate, or cash flow is not coming through – but that was a risk I knew I had to make because I was actually investing in our mission in order to make a positive impact on others.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Mastering the art of pivoting essential to sustaining a business. My most memorable pivot was in March 2020, when I supposed to be moving to the US but decided to stay in Australia. With business leaders not knowing what to do, I saw an opportunity to tap into the global market.
As previously mentioned, Hackathons Australia was initially focused as a marketing agency to activate innovation in the country. However, what I soon realized was that a lot of companies were asking us about the talent pool in Australia. Knowing this encouraged me to quickly make a change, and after two-weeks I recentered the goals of Hackathons to pivot towards finding talent as requested by our customers.
My new plan started with creating a new website targeted towards giving tech companies access to top talent around the globe. Secondly, I created a set of services to fulfill this plan. Currently we have 3 key revenue streams. Firstly, when a company like Amazon moves into a new location, they want to connect quickly into the community and to best position themselves as a company of choice. This is where our #CityHacks come in. Once a brand is best established, we run a #HackersUnited where we charge companies an upfront cost, and a finders fee on every candidate who accepts an offer. And then as individuals enter organizations, we craft internal Hackathons to quickly onboard and retain staff.
Once I landed in the US I began hustling straight away. Unfortunately, for about 6 months, it was difficult to network and find sponsors who believed in our vision, but we knew all we needed was one person. Thankfully, that one person who understood our vision was someone at Amazon and within 2 months we were executing our MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
You know you’ve made an impact when a customer is sold on your purpose and is willing to pay for the value you provide! I encourage everyone to do the same!!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hackathonsinternational.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hackathonsinternational/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hackathonsinternational
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hackathonsinternational/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/hackintl
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClgToTe9DolVcmFic5KyXPg
Image Credits
Hackathons International