Supercell
”You won't solve your hardest problem in a weekend. But you'll find the people who can.” Supercell didn't partner with Junction to expect a finished product. They partnered to find people. The kind of builders who, given a real problem and a free weekend, show you exactly how they think. And in 24 hours, with only one hour of setup, that's what they got.
Why a hackathon, and why this one?
Supercell didn't need another recruiter scrolling LinkedIn. They wanted to see talent in motion, because a hackathon does something a CV never will: it puts people in front of a hard, open-ended challenge and lets them prove what they can do.
The goals were simple. Identify strong builders. Get access to them while they're doing their best work. See what kinds of challenges people are drawn to. And in the process, do a little ecosystem building, by showing up where the next generation of technical talent actually is.
The challenge: build AI agents for gaming environments
The challenge was to build AI agents for gaming environments. It played to their strength. Supercell knows games deeply, so they weren't expecting builders to teach them the domain. They set an open, current, genuinely hard problem and watched how people approached it. This type of challenge was ideal for the objective of finding talent, because the work itself told who can think.
One hour to set up. 24 hours to find talent.
The part that surprised Supercell: getting their challenge live took only about an hour.
The plan was already in their heads, and the platform just gave it somewhere to go. At the hackathon, everything ran easily in one place: the brief, the participant flow, the teams, the submissions. This made it easy to focus fully on the most important aspects af the weekend: meeting and identifying the next talent to take on.
That's the trade that makes a hackathon ran with Junction Platform worth it. Fast set-up, and a weekend of focused, motivated builders out.
What came out of it?
Around 50 builders took on Supercell's challenge. Over the weekend, that turned into 15 shipped projects, which is a strong conversion from sign-up to actual, working submissions. Of those, around 30% stood out as genuinely strong work, which Supercell described to be around the same amount as quality applicants in traditional recruiting. The catch here is the speed and cost-efficiency a hackathon enables compared to the more traditional ways of recruiting.
The real prize here was the people behind the projects. Through office hours and one-on-one sparring, Supercell got face time with several builders who are exactly like the kind of people they hire. And through this, they’re building a community of talent who will be at the forefront of solving the future’s hardest technical problems.
Why they'd do it again?
When we asked whether they'd run a hackathon again, the answer was a quick yes.
The reasoning was pure ROI. It's an easy, efficient way to get access to interesting ideas and interesting people. It takes very little of their time to set up. And in return, hundreds of relevant builders show up.
Their one piece of advice for other companies thinking about it is to be clear on what you actually want out of it. You probably won't crack your toughest internal problem over a weekend. But if you're looking for talent, for fresh eyes on a new kind of challenge, or for a way to pull in people from outside your usual circles, a hackathon is hard to beat.
Run yours with Junction Platform
A hackathon helped Supercell identify top talent in a single weekend. The Junction Platform made it easy: one hour to set up the challenge, one 24 hours to find the right people, everything in one place.
If that's the kind of trade you're after, book a demo with us, and we'll make it happen for you too.