A hackathon platform is a website that runs coding contests, hackathons and case competitions for students, paid for by the companies that set the problems. A hackathon is a contest in which teams build a working piece of software in a fixed time, often 24 to 48 hours. A case competition is the business-school version: teams study a company's problem and present a plan to solve it.
Why do companies pay for contests? There are two reasons. The first is hiring. A contest shows what a student can actually build, which a CGPA does not show. The second is becoming known. A company that sets an interesting problem becomes familiar to thousands of students before they choose where to apply. The industry calls this employer branding.
Here is how it works. The company chooses the problem, the prize and the rules. The platform builds the contest page, advertises the contest to students on the platform and at partner colleges, and takes registrations. Teams register, and the platform checks that each member is a student, usually with a college email address or an ID card. The first round is often an online quiz or a coding test, run on a coding assessment platform. Later rounds collect each team's code and a short video. Judges from the company score each entry on a common score sheet.
Consider a private bank in Mumbai that wants to hire engineers for its payments team. It runs a fintech hackathon with a prize of ₹3 lakh for the winning team. 6,500 students register, in about 2,000 teams. 450 teams pass the online coding round. Then 40 teams build a prototype in a 36-hour online round. One team, for instance, builds an app that warns a customer before a UPI payment to an account that has been reported for fraud. The bank's engineers judge the prototypes, and the top 10 teams are invited to the bank's office for the final. Their members are offered a pre-placement interview, a job interview held before the regular campus placement season.
After the contest, the bank exports the finalists' details into its applicant tracking system (ATS), where its recruiters track each interview. The students can show their result on their profile on a campus recruiting platform.
Large platforms list thousands of contests, from quizzes to design challenges. They earn from the companies and colleges that post the contests. Students usually take part for free. So the platform is a kind of marketplace: it brings companies and students together, and it earns from the companies.
How is a hackathon platform different from a coding assessment platform? A coding assessment is a test that one person takes alone, on a timer, so that an employer can screen applicants for a job. A hackathon is a contest, usually in teams, in which students build something open-ended and are judged by people.