How we invented a Candidate Experience app in 1 week. Hack Week.

I want to tell you a story. That will start with a cliche.

“I had a dream”. Cheesy, I know.

Dedicate your working time. 20% of it

When I joined Zalando over 2.5 years ago, I was looking for, and engaging engineers to join our Tech hubs in Berlin, Dortmund and Helsinki. And I remember loud and clear one of the things I was most proud of telling them. It was like this: “Do you know, beloved candidate, that we give our colleagues in Tech the chance to work 20% of their time on their personal and professional development? You know? Like Google’s idea of “20% time”.

At that time it was a hip thing to offer people working in tech the chance to participate in Hack Weeks (and then we used to have 1 per year) and to allow them to dedicate time from their working hours to work on things that matter to them (you know, like...open source for example).

Awake the inner dreamer

Well, it’s been a while since we started doing this. And things changed. For the BETTER!

Now we actually have 4 Hack Weeks per year! And we no longer concentrate on Tech, but we open them up to the larger organisation. So that various departments can collaborate, work together and create new, innovative products. We even have something called “Hackers in Residence” if you want to participate but you are not in the departments which are officially part of a Hack Week.

Basically, anyone can be a “Hacker”. For a week. Or more. As you are about to see.

Personally, I associated the word “hacker” with the bad guys. And when the opportunity came up for a collaborative Hack Week between HR and our tech colleagues from Zalando’s Digital Foundation (basically that foundation that keeps the rest of the company moving - in the lamest terms) I had a “lightbulb” moment. “Hackers are not always the bad guys, they just disrupt things and show opportunities” I said to myself. And, I got an idea. “I had a dream”.

By the way, you can read the official blog posts the Zalando page here.

Working in recruitment for over 8 years now, I always felt very closely related to my candidates. Maybe because of my empathy. Or maybe because I was also a candidate (and more than once). So I always wanted to do “something” to improve their experience. In my Sourcing days, I was quite the candidate advocate going through thick and thin to ensure the best person-role match. And I had my heart broken (and not once) when for some reason they decided not to join. Or not to relocate. Or they joined and became miserable shortly after. The question on my mind was “Why?” “Why did this happen? What have I done wrong?”.

And there I was “hold on a minute, I was also a candidate for Zalando. I moved for my job to Berlin. How did I feel? What did I miss?” “Oh, if only I would have known about the different areas of Berlin where I can live” “Oh, if I could have pictured the magnitude of Zalando before I joined…” (now don’t get me wrong, I would have still joined because it is a bloody cool company) but “What if I would have had more support?”.

Long story short, I am not the only one thinking like this. But I was one of the people fortunate enough to be able to do something about it and help others.

Through a Hack Week project!!! Brilliant!

The idea was there, now what next? My colleague in crime, Anastasiia, already summarized her views on how we worked and what came out of the project, you can read it here: Blog post. So what I want to share with you is the “behind the scenes”.

USP

The idea was to make some sort of application (mobile, web, whatever) that would help candidates from the moment they accept an offer till the moment they actually step foot inside Zalando in our famous Welcome Day event. And then I thought “everybody has an app” what can we do to make things better?

Our answer was to “Gamify the Pre-Boarding Experience” for our candidates who would relocate to Germany, Berlin to start a new role with Zalando. Participating in the SOSU EU in Amsterdam in 2017 opened my eyes on the Gamification topic and made me curious enough to investigate further.

A plan

To kick off the Hack Week project started with a comprehensive description of the idea and an implementation plan. What skills do we need, how will it further develop, what do we want to get out of this? So the first thing after the “business case” was to recruit the team. Luckily, we ended up with a superb cross-functional team of 9 people! 9! From nothing. We had Architects, Frontend, Design, Project Managers, Talent Acquisition specialists, all working together in the end. It was unbelievable.

For our collaboration and success story we earned the price for “Swiss Army knives” - name says it all. We were multi-functional. But in a proper Swiss way :).

Timeframe

The Hack Week lasted...well...a week - from Monday to Friday! Hack week participants are requested to stop working on their regular tasks and focus only on this project. Before the week started some of us attended internal workshops about the 5 Day Design Sprint (Check it out). Wow, that blew my mind (now secretly I have a new career idea - to become a sprint master :) or something).

From Monday to Thursday, we had time to work on the product. On Friday...not so much, we were preparing for the “Hack Week Fair” at midday.

We did not work crazy hours but we worked bloody hard! We divided and conquered. Based on skills and based on workload. We actually ran our little sprint and learnt to work “together alone” in order to avoid the mess that may come out of a 9-people-brainstorming-session.

Objective

As we started, Tim (he is Tim), one of our architects said “I want to have a product, a working product, by the time this week ends”, little did I know what he actually meant by that. It sounded ambitious. You see, the idea of the Hack Week is not necessarily to have a finished product but a prototype. You don’t even have to have it up and running (online or offline) but you must be able to prove that you have done your research and that you understand where this can go further. In case you win :) hihi. Next to Tim, my colleague Vanessa asked me once over lunch “So, Andreea, what prize do you want to win?” and I found myself thinking out loud (over a slice of pizza) and saying “All of them of course”.

And there we were. We wanted to create a functional product that will blow our jury’s socks off and win all the prices (there are 6 prices, 5 category prices and the Slingshot Gold Ticket - an opportunity to work on further developing the product within the Zalando Innovation Lab).

Want to see our product? (pst, be gentle in judging it, it is still a HackWeek product with only 4 days of work behind) check it here: Zurvival current state.

Specs:

• Open Sourced (will most likely be a Zalando Incubator project soon)
• Game
• Learning App
• Integration with another HackWeek project called ZalCoin (yes we want our own CryptoCurrency - Nico lead the team)

Would I write about it if we would not have won? Probably yes. But it feels much better being able to brag proudly :).

After one week we won not 1 but 2 prices. Including the Slingshot Gold Ticket. What’s up with this? Well, let me tell you that, our team is going to be stuck (in the most positive sense of the word) in the Zalando Innovation Lab, working on further developing this product!!! Yes, that is correct. This is how we roll here. We have a sponsor who will support us, starting 2nd of May, through the development of a (proper) business case and who will stand by our side while, for 2 weeks over the course of 1 month, we will work on our product.

Did we get anything else on top? Ha! Behold. Just check out our learnings. Here:

What’s up doc?

We want to take this further. We want to develop this app (mobile / web) to help our candidates have a super smooth and easy pre-boarding. And we want to make it fun, entertaining and rewarding. We want to really help them and make their life easier by providing a “one-stop-shop” source of information when it comes to “Ok, where do I start my research now before I move to Berlin to join Zalando?”. We want to be a truly magnetic employer and do well by our future employees.

So, ask me again what do I want to win after this “Slingshot” time? I have another dream. I want to see it through that Tim has a working product and that we do such a good job that our sponsor can’t say “no” to taking this further into real development. I want it that one day you can download it from iTunes or Google Play and say “This is the type of company I want to work for”.

I am sure you are curious about this great team I’ve been telling you about. A big “Thank you” goes to all - Maria Ulbrich, Maria Goyeneche, Anastasiia Holub, Vanessa Liese, Emre Konar, Dominic Hilse, Odd Rune Jacobsen and Tim Lossen.