In the News
Win in a Corporate Competition
Wall Street Journal
06.01.2004
By Kris Maher
Bartholomew Furrow, who graduates from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, this month, plans to go on to graduate school, get a Ph.D. in physics and eventually teach the subject.
But his hobby is writing computer code, and he has done so well in recent competitions, against hundreds of other students and professionals, that Google Inc. recently offered him a summer internship.
The Web-search company identified Mr. Furrow at a competition in November called Google Code Jam, which was run by TopCoder Inc., a Glasonbury, Conn., company that organizes programming competitions and ranks individuals by their performance in solving difficult problems. “I thought, ‘What the heck, it could be fun,’” Mr. Furrow, 20 years old, says of his coming job at Google. “Is this something I want to do for the rest of my life? Probably not. But I’ll get a sense this summer.”
More companies are using competitions to discover candidates with standout skills and talent. Fields such as architecture and fashion design have long held competitions to allow students to showcase their work. But others, including technology companies and advertisers, also are interested in seeing how people perform against their peers.
Competitions are especially useful when evaluating students who lack a significant professional track record. But they also give employers a way to measure intangibles, such as how people handle pressure, and the events help identify candidates with a competitive streak who might go the extra mile to find innovative solutions to problems.
For students, “it’s a wonderful way to present your candidacy and show what you’re going to be like in the real word,” says Brad Karsh, president of JobBound, a Chicago career-counseling company.
Sponsoring events allows companies to raise their profile among students. In some cases, companies can also benefit directly from student creativity. This year, for example, Visit Florida, the state’s official tourism marketing corporation, is sponsoring the American Advertising Federation’s National Student Advertising Competition, and the group can use any of the ideas generated by students in its own future ad campaigns. More than 1,000 marketing students are participating this year.
Some companies that run their own competitions are seeing them grow. For 12 years, L’Oreal SA has run a marketing contest in which students act as brand managers for a beauty product. The program started out with a few schools in France participating and has grown to 26 this year, including eight in the U.S. From 2001 to 2003, the company hired about 75 student competitors for full-time and internship positions. So far this year, it has hired more than 30 students from the program.
In 2001, L’Oreal started a separate online contest, E-Strat, which attracted 7,800 student competitors. This year, 31,000 students from 113 countries have managed a portfolio of beauty brands through the company’s online business game. Finalists got to present their ideas to a panel of executives in Paris.
“It’s something that people [in the company] identify with internationally, so we get a lot of management support,” says Celica Thellier, vice president of corporate strategic recruitment and career development for L’Oreal USA.
For students, beating out hundreds or thousands of competitors and just reaching the finals can be its own thrill. In April, Mr. Furrow tied for 10th place in a TopCoder competition that started out with 900 competitors. Thirty-two finalists from 15 countries were flown to Boston to solve programming problems in front of an audience that included recruiters.
“I get really excited just seeing the energy they throw at these problems,” says Daniel Rohrer, a manager of DirectX at Nvidia Corp, in Santa Clara, Calif., who attended the event. Mr. Rohrer said he was impressed with the competitors and that his company is interviewing several of them.
“It’s kind of like a sporting event for coders,” he says. “I don’t know that I necessarily operate at the level that these guys operate.”
