Fully Baked #10: Hiring Contests

💡 A new way for companies to find amazing talent

🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found

🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this business

🤑 Can you make any money doing this?

⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks

❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea

Companies create a contest in under 30 minutes - define the challenge, set the prize pool, specify the roles up for grabs, and publish to a public leaderboard. Say a fintech startup wants to hire a growth marketer: they post "Build us a Gen Z credit card campaign - best submission wins $3,000 and a job offer."

Candidates submit through verified integrations with GitHub, Figma, and Notion - so submissions are authenticated and portfolios auto-populate. A blind judging mode strips names and LinkedIn profiles from initial scoring, so the best work wins regardless of pedigree.

Built-in AI submission detection flags generated entries that don't reflect genuine ability, while a structured interview fast-track unlocks automatically for top performers

One platform for bills, company spending, payments, and approvals

Automated workflows that cut down manual work

Real-time visibility into every dollar

The global recruitment software market was valued at $3.2B in 2025 and growing to $5.9B by 2032 - but virtually all of it is built around screening candidates who've already applied through traditional channels. The competition-as-hiring format is essentially unserved by existing tooling.

We spent some time in r/recruiting (900k+ members) and r/cscareerquestions (1M+ members). The dominant recruiter complaint was the same everywhere: "We get 400 applications and none of them tell us if someone can actually do the job."

71% of hiring managers said they'd be interested in running a skills-based competition if the legal, prize logistics, and candidate sourcing were handled for them. We targeted HR Directors and startup founders at companies with 10-500 employees currently hiring.

22% of job seekers said they'd prefer to compete in a public challenge over submitting a traditional resume. It’s more effort of course, but this could be a great filter for finding the right person for the job.

19.3% click-to-signup rate - well above the 8-10% benchmark for B2B HR tools. The hook clearly landed with people who've spent too long staring at indistinguishable resumes.

Some founders asked about running a pilot for a current open role, one asked if we could run a design competition for their rebrand. Immediate use cases, zero prompting needed.

Startup communities: Post in Indie Hackers, YC's Slack, and On Deck with a simple offer - "We'll run your first hiring competition for free, you cover the prize." One great case study ("we hired our first engineer through a 48-hour coding challenge and got 340 applicants") is worth more than any ad budget at this stage.

Outbound to companies with live job postings: Set up alerts for Series A and B companies posting mid-senior roles on LinkedIn and reach out within 48 hours with a personalised pitch: "You're hiring a [role]. Here's how we'd run a 2-week competition to find the best one - you only pay if you hire."

Viral loop via public leaderboards: Every public competition is its own distribution engine. Candidates share their ranking with their network, companies post about their novel hiring approach on LinkedIn, and Hirecomps gets mentioned in every post. Nice.

Content targeting the "broken hiring" narrative: Publish original research on how many qualified candidates get filtered out by keyword-matching ATS systems and you'll get picked up by every HR publication. Once you have real outcome data - time-to-hire, candidate quality scores, retention rates vs. traditional hires - that becomes the most powerful sales asset you own.

Starter ($2,500/competition): Full setup, public leaderboard, up to 500 candidate submissions, blind judging, and integrated interview fast-track for top 5 performers

Pro ($5,000-$10,000/competition): Everything in Starter plus promoted distribution to Hirecomps' candidate network

Target CAC (cost to acquire a customer): $600-$900 via outbound and startup community word-of-mouth

Target LTV (lifetime value): $15,000+ assuming a company runs 3 competitions per year at an average of $5,000 and churns at 30% annually

LTV:CAC ratio: 16-25x if you can make repeat competitions the norm

HackerRank (from $249/month/user): The incumbent for technical hiring assessments with 2,500+ enterprise customers. Built for coding tests and structured interviews, not open public competitions with prize pools and leaderboards.

Codility (custom enterprise pricing, typically $10,000+/year): Strong for senior engineering hires with live coding and proctored assessments. Like HackerRank, it's a filter on candidates who've already applied - not a mechanism for attracting new ones through open competition and social sharing.

TestGorilla (from $75/month): The friendliest and most accessible skills assessment tool for SMBs. No competition format, no prize infrastructure, no public leaderboard - it's a pre-employment screener, not a talent magnet.

Every existing platform is built around filtering candidates who found you, not attracting candidates who wouldn't have applied otherwise. Nobody owns the "public hiring competition" category

The opportunity is a purpose-built competition platform that turns every open role into a talent magnet - not a better way to screen the same pool, but a fundamentally different way to build one.

Have an idea you want feedback on? DM me to discuss it or book in for Office Hours here.

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