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IMQS’s culture of innovation has shaped its approach to career fairs where it tries to offer job seekers a glimpse into the world of IMQS. In July this year, we directed our gaze at Rhodes University to find out what the Eastern Cape had to offer in terms of creative young talent. How does IMQS approach career fairs differently and what were we up to at Rhodes?
BUILDING BUSINESS, MAINTAINING CULTURE
Our culture of innovation has been in the making for over a decade. Moulded by the people we employ and the customers we value, this culture is defined by a universal interest in solving real world problems by building the best software solutions for the problems at hand.
Positive growth requires our business to expand and therefore the need has arisen to grow the IMQS family. Investing in human capital is, however, not always about snatching the top student in a graduate class. We rather try to discover interesting individuals that are creative, inspired and inspiring – people that add real value to our organisational culture.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO RHODES
Career fairs form a particular space in which business representatives directly engage with prospective job seekers. Like all major companies, IMQS has been directing its search for new talent at the country’s top universities. In July of this year our team travelled to Grahamstown to see what Rhodes University had to offer.
The team set up shop in the campus’ Eden Grove building, alongside the Amazons, Nedbanks and Alan Grays of the South African employment landscape. Colourful stalls, glossy brochures and the usual exchange of questions and answers were the general order of the day.
In order to show students just what it is that IMQS does, our dedicated team decided to differentiate themselves from the usual talent scouts and breathe life into what is often a rather run of the mill affair. They did this by offering the crowd a bit of friendly competition in the form of a game.
FINDING TALENT THROUGH GAMING
The “gamification” of IMQS’s approach was established at Stellenbosch in 2015 where students were invited to showcase their basic coding abilities by writing a program to contain an Ebola outbreak. By working their way through multiple levels, students were given the opportunity to put their skills to use in order to solve a real world problem.
Building on this successful model, our team came up with a new multi-level time based coding game to test basic coding skills in a fast-moving competitive environment. Competitors at Rhodes were given 15 minutes to traverse more than 4 levels, each being more difficult to crack than the next.
With more than 20 entrants over the course of a day, the Eden Grove was momentarily turned into a “Colloseum of coding”. By lunchtime only three remained. Dean Fouché, Michael Du Plessis and Damon Hook were left to go head-to-head in a sweaty sudden death tiebreaker. With a winning time of just over seven minutes, Hook finally beat his two opponents on level 5, with Du Plessis coming in a close second. Hook took away R2000 in prize money and the accolade for being the most promising coder Rhodes had to offer on the day.
NURTURING TALENT THE IMQS WAY
IMQS is at the forefront of building comprehensive solutions for real challenges that affect people on an everyday basis. Infrastructure is integral in delivering basic services and spurring on economic development. The success or failure in managing and maintaining infrastructure assets can be the difference in whether someone receives clean drinking water or not.
The Rhodes students showed great ability and we were thoroughly impressed, to say the least! But, this is what makes IMQS so excited about finding and nurturing young talent. For innovation to extend beyond ideation you need individuals that can work under pressure and are willing to apply out-of-the-box thinking. They must want to grow their skills and direct their growth towards creating and implementing real solutions to everyday problems. At IMQS this is our purpose and this is what we see as value!
