How BET Software Turned a Virtual Hackathon into a High-Signal Talent Acquisition Engine

When Hiring Engineers Becomes Deeply Human

Hiring tools have never been more plentiful, yet the experience of being hired still often feels impersonal. Great engineers are looking for more than a job: they want meaningful work, room to keep learning, a fair process, and a culture that genuinely values engineering.

Traditional assessments are good at testing an individual's skills in isolation. They are far worse at revealing how someone behaves inside a real team—or what it actually feels like to build something alongside the people you would join. BET Software set out to design a talent-acquisition experience engineers would want to be part of, one that surfaced richer human signals through collaborative, real-world work.

Why This Story Matters Now

Every organisation hiring engineers is wrestling with the same three problems: standing out in a crowded talent market, trusting a hiring decision when every CV looks alike, and creating an experience that actually reflects the company's culture.

This hackathon sits at the intersection of all three. It treats talent acquisition as a designed experience—supported by AI and virtual infrastructure rather than replaced by it. Three questions framed the experiment:

• Can a virtual hackathon function as a genuine talent engine, not just a marketing event?
• What behavioural signals emerge during collaborative problem-solving that a CV can never show?
• How do you design an experience that benefits the organisation, the hiring team and the participating engineers equally?

A Quick Look at the Scale

A prize pool of R50,000 drew a large, engaged field, which then concentrated stage by stage into a small group of high-signal finishers:

• 2,300+ applications
• 600+ candidates shortlisted
• 160 finalists invited
• 130+ participants who took part
• 50+ teams formed
• 40+ demos delivered
• 90%+ completion rate—well above the ±60% typical of open public hackathons

Each stage of that funnel signals something different: applications show brand pull, shortlisting shows baseline fit, finalist attendance shows commitment, and demo delivery shows follow-through and resilience under pressure.

The Partners Behind the Weekend

The weekend worked because no single organisation had to carry it alone.

Otinga provided the platform infrastructure—handling applications, screening, team formation, judging and the capture of soft-skill signals—and built the virtual venue in Gather.town. That let BET Software's people spend the weekend mentoring and deciding, not administrating.

OfferZen brought developer-community reach and contextualised outreach, connecting the event to engineers who were genuinely a fit. Couchbase, Confluent and Red Hat joined as technology and prize partners, grounding the challenges in real production stacks rather than toy problems.

The Talent Challenge: Standing Out in a Noisy Market

BET Software needed engineers who go beyond basic coding competence—people comfortable with the complexity of real payment systems, collaborative under pressure, and attentive to detail.

The trouble is that strong developers are inundated with recruiter outreach, and interview loops start to feel interchangeable on both sides. Engineers want to know whether a role offers real growth, a fair process and a team culture worth joining—questions a standard interview can't answer. That gap, for both the company and the candidate, is exactly what a shared, real-world experience can close.

What We Built: A Virtual FinTech Talent Hackathon

The answer was a virtual FinTech hackathon built around four deliberate design choices:

• Time-boxed focus: 36 hours of concentrated, high-energy work.
• Real-world payments challenges: problems that mirror the kind of work engineers would actually do at BET Software.
• Team-based collaboration: engineers built in teams, not in isolation.
• A clear demo finish line: every team worked toward a tangible demo.

The format felt less like an assessment and more like a compressed product sprint. The FinTech theme attracted engineers who were genuinely interested in the domain; virtual delivery removed logistical barriers to entry; and the structure naturally surfaced ownership, teamwork, communication and resilience—behaviours that are very hard to fake in an interview.

The Infrastructure: AI-Powered Platform & Virtual Venue

Two pieces of infrastructure did the heavy lifting.

Otinga's AI-powered platform managed the entire participant journey end to end: applications, screening, team formation, judging rubrics, communications and behavioural-signal capture. That freed BET Software's people to mentor rather than administrate.

The Gather.town virtual venue turned what could have been a static grid of video calls into a customised digital space. Avatars moved around and naturally approached teammates, mentors and hiring managers—recreating the energy of a great in-person offsite while remaining entirely online. Together, the two provided structure while preserving genuine human connection.

A Talent Funnel with Real Signal

The real value was in what each funnel stage revealed.

Thousands of applications showed brand resonance. Shortlisting identified baseline technical fit. Finalist attendance showed genuine motivation. And the 90%+ completion rate proved persistence, accountability, adaptability and ownership—traits that rarely show up in a standard interview but matter enormously on a production team.

That completion rate is the standout signal. It's roughly 50% higher than the ±60% typical of open public hackathons, and it points to participants who were building alongside committed peers rather than collecting swag—a self-reinforcing cycle of quality engagement.

Human-Centred Hiring and the "Secret Shopper" Lens

Hiring managers took part as avatars inside Gather.town. Rather than running staged interviews, they moved through the space and observed collaboration, leadership, growth mindset and coachability as they naturally occurred.

Those observations were translated into structured soft-skill signals: teamwork, learning orientation, response to feedback, initiative and critical thinking. The effect was a high-fidelity window into real on-the-job behaviour for the hiring team—while participants experienced mentoring, not surveillance. Decisions were grounded in lived evidence alongside technical scores.

Talent Experience and Brand Moments

Participants pointed to several things they valued: stretching themselves on new tools, connecting with a community of driven peers, meaningful mentorship, and—perhaps unexpectedly—how much they enjoyed the gamified environment.

Dozens of organic social posts followed, with high engagement, as engineers celebrated their demos and thanked their mentors. That kind of authentic, third-party validation is the most valuable form of employer branding—far more credible than any official campaign.

Beyond Hiring: Impact for Organisations, Participants and the Tech Ecosystem

The impact reached well beyond a single round of hires.

For organisations: a repeatable, scalable talent model with a richer pipeline grounded in demonstrated behaviour rather than CV claims. For participants: compressed learning, an expanded professional network, and a tangible portfolio piece for future conversations. For the ecosystem: a signal that transparent, meaningful hiring exists—spaces where emerging and experienced engineers collaborate differently, and a cultural shift toward opportunity visibility and learning-integrated recruitment over purely transactional approaches.

Lessons and What Comes Next

Five lessons carry forward:

1. Design talent acquisition as an experience, not a pipeline.
2. Let structure and technology create space for human contact, rather than replacing it.
3. Treat behaviour as a first-class hiring signal, alongside technical scores.
4. Build repeatable models that adapt to different roles, teams and regions.
5. To innovate is human—the best signals come from watching people do real work together.

The experiment proved that a virtual format can seriously drive talent acquisition, surface behavioural signals invisible to a CV, and create an experience that benefits everyone involved—establishing reusable patterns for data, platform and security teams across new markets.

Want to turn hiring into a high-signal experience? Start a conversation to learn how Otinga designs and runs innovation hackathons that reveal how people really work.