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Find Your Next Role26. August 2021
Weekathon: The Road to 2023
Last week Personios from all over Europe took part in Weekathon: The Road to 2023. Often known as a hackathon or hack week, these events present a unique chance for tech company employees to pause normal project work and flex their creative muscles. With this temporary extra capacity, employees are able to focus on improvement opportunities or problems to solve within their product.
In Personio's case, employees submitted over 40 project ideas in the lead-up to Weekathon – each one representing a way for our team to live out our company values of #CustomerEmpathy, #Ownership, and #Teamspirit. From there, Personios joined up with the project they were most interested in to form dedicated teams. During the week-long sprint, each team ideated, designed, and, in some cases, built prototypes of their concepts.
At the end of the week, teams presented their solution via promotional video in our all-company meeting. We then voted on our favorites in categories like Conversion Booster, People Productivity, and Squad Goals (with a special nod to teams who produced "Oscar-worthy" promo videos, of course).
But it wouldn’t be a Personio event if we didn’t include a little something extra. In this case we also consumed 390 pretzels and just over 400 cupcakes; engaged in team HIIT workouts and yoga sessions; and joined six Lunch and Learn presentations to learn more about our fellow employees.
Unsurprisingly, putting on Weekathon was a true team effort. Nine employees from our Customer Experience, Product & Engineering, People & Workplace, and Go To Market teams came together to bring it to life. (Not to mention the ever-present and always necessary Office Management team! What would we do without them?) While this is not the first hackathon Personio has hosted, it is the first that lasted a full week.
Roman Schumacher, CPO and executive sponsor of the Weekathon project, said, “We had great success in innovating and creating customer value in past hackathons, so we knew giving the teams a full week to really focus on their Personio passion projects would yield amazing results.”
And he was right! Not only did our teams create great solutions and interesting new features, Weekathon was also an opportunity for new joiners to dive right into the Personio experience. One project, focused around diversity, equality, and inclusion in the workplace, brought together multiple new joiners from different teams. And, in the spirit of their focus, together they represented five different countries: Brazil, Nigeria, Germany, the United States, and Venezuela.
While Weekathon 2021 is officially over, we’re excited to see where these projects take us! Does Personio sound like the kind of place you’d like to join? Then you have good timing, because we’re hiring! Check out the open jobs on our careers page and apply today.