Guide to crafting effective hackathon judging criteria

Hackathons are dynamic events that bring together participants from diverse backgrounds—analysts, coders, business strategists, designers, and more—to tackle real-world challenges within a specified time frame. These gatherings have gained immense popularity, as organizations increasingly turn to hackathons for various purposes, such as brand-building, talent acquisition, and employee training and development.

At a hackathon, participants harness the power of collaboration and creativity to produce functional solutions or prototypes for services, products, or business models. However, the success of a hackathon extends beyond its participants; it relies on the collective efforts of teams comprising developers, designers, and innovators who confront complex problems under time constraints. The growing interest in hackathons has led many organizations to host these events, aiming to enhance employee engagement, recruit top talent, and foster community connections.

A critical aspect of organizing a successful hackathon is understanding how to evaluate it effectively. Judging plays a vital role in recognizing promising ideas and providing constructive feedback to participants. Judges must possess more than just a keen eye for technical skills; they should have a clear understanding of the event’s objectives and goals. As such, organizers need to be well-versed in assessment methods to ensure a fair evaluation process that encourages innovation and growth. This blog will cover the three most essential bedrocks of a successful hackathon: the mentors and judges and the judging criteria.

Hackathon mentors are accomplished professionals dedicating their time and efforts to help participants in their areas of expertise throughout a hackathon event. Effective mentorship is what drives teams to turn ideas into beautiful realities. Whether technical or non-technical, hackathon mentors can play a pivotal role in determining the success of a project. Their responsibilities vary significantly across the mentoring spectrum based on their domain expertise.

For example, some mentors are excellent at helping teams with techniques to improve design, originality and user experience, and others are subject matter experts in specific business processes. And some mentors possess expertise across a wide range of technical capabilities.

Hackathon mentors ensure meaningful experiences for hackers in such time-intensive creative events. They may be in the hacking space during in-person events, following their rotation schedule, waiting for hackers to beckon them to address their queries. Mentorship for a virtual hackathon is quite like an offline hackathon. Mentors provide insights into the challenge or thematic subject and assist in developing the skills needed for the challenge. In other words, the ideal mentors are strategically aligned to the event’s themes and goals.

Listed below are some professionals who may play the mentor’s role during an event:

• Senior technologists – accomplished software project managers, analysts, developers, etc.
• CTOs and CIOs
• Startup founders and entrepreneurs
• Marketing and business development leaders
• Project directors

Hack teams comprise members with diverse backgrounds. Each has knowledge, experience and objectives. Sometimes, seeking solutions makes them feel deviated, disoriented and doubtful of their abilities. The role of a mentor is to become a beacon of hope to drive out obscurity and confusion, providing teams with new perspectives to solve challenges. The team needs someone with adequate experience and skills to help them glide through obstacles.

Below are some of the roles and duties of a hackathon mentor:

• Speeding up generating multiple ideas for challenges and solutions through brainstorming sessions.
• Giving unparalleled guidance.
• Keeping track of time amidst an intense event schedule.
• Identifying the person who is going to pitch the project.
• Assisting in the division of roles within the team.
• Helping teams if they are feeling stuck at any stage.

Judges are the important decision-makers vested with the authority to evaluate submissions and declare winners during the demo of the hackathon event. Without them, undertakings of such a scale would not be possible. They are responsible for expressing their opinions on the pitches received, assessing the teams’ efforts individually and determining who is eligible to win. In addition, they would grade ideas based on realistic capability, level of innovation, business value and ingenuity.

Selection of judges

Hackathon judges must have extensive technical backgrounds; however, there are exceptions to subject matter specialists for themed events.

Judges are usually onboarded from sponsoring companies; however, organizers can also onboard more judges if needed. Even mentors with a mix of technical and subject-matter expertise can be commissioned to perform the role of a judge.

Choosing an adequate panel of judges will go a long way toward better branding a specific hackathon event and attracting participants. In addition, bringing together a panel of industry celebrities as judges to draw participants to connect with the event garners maximum eyeballs. For example, hackers may aspire to display their ideas if industry bigwigs are panel members.

Hackathon judges with expertise on the challenge or thematic subject can gauge a final product or idea’s prowess based on the following:

• Feasibility
• Novelty
• Design
• Simplicity
• Business value

Some pro-tips are:

• Connect with notable personalities in the industry and shortlist a few names once the event details have been finalized.
• Technology evangelists, reputed academic professionals, seasoned industry veterans, and industry honchos can be considered.
• One can request someone’s presence from organizations they wish to be sponsors.
• Judges should be informed of the hackathon criteria for selecting winners before the event, such as the parameters to assess a hack or deliverable, the scoring system, etc.
• Judges should not be saddled with a boatload of submissions. Before entrusting them with the evaluation task, considering their bandwidth is essential.

Hackathon judging criteria include standards and guidelines to assess the projects or solutions developed during a hackathon competition. They serve as a framework for judging submissions and choosing winners. The hackathon organizers establish these criteria. The specific goals and objectives of the hackathon determine the requirements. They depend on innovation, functionality, usability, scalability, impact potential, and overall presentation.

Hackathon candidates present their projects to a panel of judges who evaluate them based on these hackathon criteria to determine the projects that can be successful.

What are the hackathon judging criteria that one should consider?

• Code quality: Well-organized and maintainable code ensures the project’s long-term viability. The quality of the code is critical in determining a hackathon project’s success. Judges assess the efficiency, cleanliness, and readability of the codebase.
• Adherence to project timelines: Judges assess whether participants have completed their projects within the allotted timeframe, demonstrating effective time management and timely delivery of results.
• Presentation skills: Beyond technical evaluation, judges also focus on presentation skills. Candidates must convey their ideas, highlight their project’s characteristics and functionalities, and engage the audience during their presentations.
• Market potential: Judges consider whether the solution is commercially viable and can be effectively implemented in the marketplace. When assessing market potential, the judges consider competitive edge, target audience, and revenue generation potential.
• Scalability: Judges seek projects designed with scalability, ensuring they can accommodate more extensive data sets or a growing number of users over time. Scalability pertains to a project’s ability to manage increased usage or growth without sacrificing performance or functionality.
• Usability: A project that is easily comprehensible and accessible to a broad range of users scores high in this area. Judges examine how user-friendly and intuitive the project is, considering clear instructions, ease of navigation, and a straightforward interface.
• Teamwork: Judges acknowledge the significance of teamwork and cooperation during these events. Hackathons involve teams collaborating to develop their projects. It helps evaluate how well team members communicate, delegate tasks, collaborate, and strive towards a shared objective.
• Technical innovation: A key factor that judges often consider is the degree of technical innovation exhibited by the project, which evaluates the originality and creativity of the solution and its potential to address real-world challenges. Judges consider projects merging innovation with substantial impact as vital, as these concepts can transform industries, enhance lives, and foster advancement across sectors.

Credible and proper judging criteria enhance the hackathon. It is essential due to the following:

• Promotes participation: Objective assessment encourages participants to put in their best efforts. It results in increased participation and creates a healthy learning and competitive environment.
• Enhances credibility: A hackathon’s reputation relies on its ability to provide and promote a platform for applicants to present their skills. By implementing well-thought criteria, organizers can attract future participants and build credibility.
• Celebrates innovation: A proper selection ensures that innovative ideas and solutions are recognized and rewarded appropriately. It motivates participants to think outside the box and develop groundbreaking ideas.

Virtual hackathons have successfully infused innovation by streamlining the process for key stakeholders – organizers, participants, mentors and judges through new-age platforms. Online hackathon platforms are instrumental in fostering innovation and engagement.

Mentors

Communication is of the essence to ensure clear expectations are set between the mentor and participant. A virtual hackathon platform has many features to facilitate spontaneous communication between mentors and mentees, such as private messaging features to communicate and collaborate, regardless of time and location.

Judges

Hackathon events often witness massive participation, leaving judges needing help with the enormous task of assessing every entry. Online hackathon platforms empower organizations to conduct a successful hackathon with a unified dashboard for admins and judges. They can quickly schedule and manage large-scale participation, automate the shortlisting process, and enable the easy review of submissions by judges and panellists. In short, virtual hackathon platforms provide judges with all the resources they need to be successful in their respective roles.

Organizers

Organizations can leverage virtual hackathon platforms to pursue diverse objectives, such as establishing a brand presence, engaging the workforce, recruiting top talent, and innovating with the best and the brightest. Due to the broad applicability and immense potential of virtual platforms, there is a staggering increase in the number of virtual events being conducted globally. The virtual platform enables companies to engage participants simultaneously across different time zones and geographies. Such a tech-enabled platform allows companies to easily host hackathon events and manage them end-to-end, from registration to project submission to judging.

Participants

Participants usually work on their tasks at an onsite event at a particular time and period. Moreover, some people cannot attend such events for various reasons, such as a packed schedule or unavoidable commitments. Flexibility is one of the most significant advantages that online hackathons provide. Virtual hackathons can extend longer than traditional face-to-face hack events, which gives participants a lot of leeway to regain their composure amid the fast pace of the event. Most importantly, people with strenuous schedules can work on their projects conveniently.

Mercer | Mettl’s Xathon is an all-in-one hackathon management platform that hosts world-class hackathons effortlessly and successfully. Crafted to host large-scale, engaging hackathons, it helps identify and hire the top tech talent and engage with existing employees and tech communities. Some of the key features are:

• Real-time and seamless collaboration with stakeholders – mentors, judges, participants and organizers.
• Easy login for mentors and judges to provide insights and access team data and submissions.
• Easy-to-create personalized event pages with a custom registration form to engage participants.
• Quick scheduling of tasks and stages on a dashboard.
• Seamless integration with other tools, internal social networks and IT systems.
• Simple submission management to ease the process of monitoring scores, submissions, and status.
• Insightful leadership board to receive live event updates on top performers and other crucial aspects.

Xathon helps organize a hackathon in four basic steps:

• It begins with creating a compelling webpage for the event, logging onto Mercer | Mettl’s hackathon platform and entering all pertinent information about the hackathon. It is followed by putting forth the requirements by defining challenges, central themes, participation, guidelines and prizes across a single dashboard. Through these steps, the event is ready to be launched.
• Mercer | Mettl’s hackathon toolkit is handy for marketing support, community reachouts, social media and email campaigns to drive registrations and increase engagement. Promoting a hackathon becomes easier using Mercer | Mettl’s dedicated marketing SPOC.
• Letting the event unfold with candidates quickly forming teams, strategizing, collaborating, and course-correcting with mentors’ helping and managing their submissions on a single platform. Informing groups of their progress becomes simpler through automated approvals and rejections after round completion. With the dynamic leadership board, teams can track live updates and scores.
• Once the contest ends, the judges can log in, grade submissions or analyze the automated results. Then, the organizers can reveal and reward the winners and dive deep into post-event analytics to derive the ROI.

With top-of-the-line features that help businesses grow, Mercer | Mettl’s Xathon helps conduct campus and corporate hackathons. Mercer | Mettl’s decades-old expertise, holistic view and analytical rigor make Xathon a product that has been preferred and valued by some of the most renowned organizations- JP Morgan, Microsoft, Amazon and Accenture, to name a few.

With Mercer | Mettl’s Xathon, one can get closer to their objectives with thorough assistance from subject matter experts who help define problem statements that align with the goals, business, and themes and help finalize solutions. In addition, the 24X7 support team ensures seamless process execution to make the event successful.