Hackathons as Career Catalysts: Innovative Pathways to Professional Integration

Can hackathons bridge the gap between skilled migrants and local job markets? The Hack Integration project uses hackathons to improve integration and inclusion. The project tests whether high-skill refugees and migrants find better jobs after working with local fellow professionals in a collaborative hackathon environment and whether balanced hackathon teams formed through a team suggestion are more productive and satisfied.

The Challenge: Bridging the Skills Gap Despite Qualified Migration

Many high-skill occupations currently have low unemployment rates and high vacancy rates. This gap could be partially filled by refugees. For example, in 2022 70% of Ukrainian refugees in Switzerland ages 18 to 59 had a university degree and spoke English (Fritschi et al. 2023). Many have training in occupations suffering skill shortages such as engineering, health, and IT. At the same time, high-skill refugees do not usually find jobs matching their qualifications. Research suggests that this mismatch stems primarily from their reliance on social networks in their job search (Lamba 2003), though formal employment interventions seem to steer participants to even-lower skill jobs (Godin and Renaud 2002; Bloch 2008; Lacroix et al. 2015; Steimel 2017).

At the same time, team formation presents another challenge: While self-formed teams often lack diversity, algorithmic approaches to team building use somewhat arbitrary scoring mechanisms to improve overall balance and often fail to consider participant preferences (Layton et a. 2010; Yannibelli & Amandi 2017). There are studies that investigate whether such point systems are plausible for the formation of optimal teams (Spoelstra et al. 2015).

The Research Project: Two Key Questions

This project explores two research questions. The first question examines whether hackathons as a collaborative context provide better career opportunities than traditional job search methods. These events are a context in which refugees can demonstrate their skills and abilities and meet potential future colleagues, overcoming the critical hurdle that those reading anonymous CV’s tend to undervalue foreign accreditations and experience. We test whether refugees and migrants attending suitable hackathons find better jobs. We do this first helping refugees identify appropriate events and then collecting data using a two-phase survey looking at participants job search experience and professional networks pre- and post-participation. Within the project we also link administrative data on employment. Our participants are not only compared to themselves over time, but also to individuals attending our two partners’ programs, Capacity, and Power Coders, who work in high-skill labor market integration. In addition, they will be compared with a constructed control group from administrative data.

Our second research focus investigates team formation at hackathon events. Using a randomized control trial, we test whether a new team suggestion tool that balances team composition can improve satisfaction, productivity, and stability at hackathon events. We recruit events and assign them to either a treatment group that will test the “deferred acceptance algorithm” or a control group (usually using self-assignment for team formation). How does the algorithm work?

• Participants rank their team preferences and indicate their skills
• Teams specify required skills
• A common maximum team size applies to all teams
• The algorithm processes matches through multiple iterations:
  • Unmatched individuals “offer” themselves to their most preferred team that hasn’t yet rejected them
  • Teams accept if they need this skill and have space on their team
  • If a team needs a specific skill but has no space, they may accept the new offer and remove someone with a less-needed skill
  • Rejected individuals then offer themselves to their next preferred team in subsequent iterations
  • This process continues until no new offers are made

At events participants receive the team suggestion on a name tag but are free to choose another team if they like. Event participants answer a post-event questionnaire covering the event and team experience. For events using our partner hackathon hosting platform Dribdat, we will also have measures of team productivity and stability, such as whether projects uploaded prototypes or how often individuals switched teams.

The Solution: Hackathons as Platforms for Diverse Professional Connections

The BFH School of Social Work, the BFH Business Department’s Digital Sustainability Lab, and UZH Economics Department are working together to use hackathons to help high-skill refugees find more apprs. This could help refugees and migrants improve their employment and income, reduce social benefit receipt and poverty, and help close the skill gap. At the same time, hackathons are an excellent platform to test whether “” considering both preferences and participant characteristics can be used to form inclusive, satisfied, and productive teams. These algorithms have already been applied in various fields like school choice with more recent innovations incorporating diversity.

Implementation: Partners and Participation Opportunities

We are already working together with hackathon organizers and corporate partners. We help these partners recruit diverse participants by highlighting open events in our hackfinder tool or referring qualified refugees to take dedicated slots in private events. In addition, some of these events help us test the team suggestion tool, with half the events helping us using the tool and half not.

We are also working with social partners. These partners help us recruit high-skilled refugees and migrants to attend hackathon events. For the refugees this means we help them find a relevant event in their professional field. Events typically span one to two days and include catering and social activities. Some events like our https://hack4socialgood.ch/ even offer a parallel digital program for children to participate! To help migrants take part, we provide a small stipend of CHF 20 for those who attend an event and complete our research surveys.

Join us in reimagining professional integration – whether you’re organizing a hackathon, representing a corporation, or are a skilled refugee/migrant professional looking to participate in this innovative approach to career development.

Wanted: Hackathon organizers interested in inclusion and diversity

Wanted: High-skill refugees/migrants looking to work in their professional fields

Sources

Bloch, A. (2008). Refugees in the UK labour market: The conflict between economic integration and policy-led labour market restriction. Journal of Social Policy, 37(1), 21-36.

Fritschi, T., Neuenschwander, P., Hevenstone, D., Lehmann, O., Läser, J., & Hänggeli, A. (2023). Arbeitsmarktrelevante Merkmale von Personen Mit Schutzstatus s. Bern. https://www. newsd. admin. ch/newsd/message/attachments/74948. Pdf.

Godin, J. F., & Renaud, J. (2002). The impact of non-governmental organizations and language skills on the employability of refugee claimants: evidence from Quebec. Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal, 34(1), 112-134.

Lacroix, M., Baffoe, M., & Liguori, M. (2015). Refugee community organizations in C anada: From the margins to the mainstream? A challenge and opportunity for social workers. International Journal of Social Welfare, 24(1), 62-72.

Lamba, N. K. (2003). The employment experiences of Canadian refugees: Measuring the impact of human and social capital on quality of employment. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 40(1), 45-64.

Layton, R. A., Loughry, M. L., Ohland, M. W., & Ricco, G. D. (2010). Design and validation of a web-based system for assigning members to teams using instructor-specified criteria. Advances in Engineering Education, 2(1), n1.

Spoelstra, H., Van Rosmalen, P., Houtmans, T., & Sloep, P. (2015). Team formation instruments to enhance learner interactions in open learning environments. Computers in human behavior, 45, 11-20.

Steimel, S. (2017). Negotiating refugee empowerment (s) in resettlement organizations. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 15(1), 90-107.

Yannibelli, V., & Amandi, A. (2017, October). A hybrid evolutionary algorithm based on adaptive mutation and crossover for collaborative learning team formation in higher education. In International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (pp. 345-354). Cham: Springer International Publishing.