Case Study

How Amadeus brought awareness to it’s APIs with a developer coding challenge

About Amadeus

Over the last 30 years, Amadeus, one of the top travel technology companies in the world, has built critical solutions that help key players in the travel industry, such as airlines, airports, hotels, railways, search engines, travel agencies, and tour operators, to run their operations and enhance travel experience for people all over the world.

Naturally, as the travel industry has come to further rely on technology, it is more necessary than ever to offer cutting-edge technological solutions that help key players in the travel industry succeed – and Amadeus does just that with solutions such as Amadeus for Developers.

Amadeus for Developers

Amadeus for Developers is the key behind building state-of-the-art businesses in the travel industry. In the past, if one wanted to operate in the travel industry, there were a lot of hoops one had to jump through before setting up a business.

However, thanks to a catalog of Amadeus Self-Service APIs, businesses can be set up by simply creating an account, getting an API key, and leveraging the API at the back end of an application. With this API, Amadeus has enabled developers to experience, first-hand, the powerful role they can play in starting and scaling travel solutions.

Requirements and goals

Amadeus’ need for running a hiring challenge stemmed from two key objectives.

The Indian market has been a recent focus area for Amadeus. To this end, Amadeus has released booking capabilities of flights in the Indian market and has been working on strengthening its market presence. To further establish themselves in the Indian market, Amadeus needed to accelerate its developer hiring process.

Secondly, the company was on the lookout for ways to build awareness of Amadeus for Developers Self-Service APIs among the diverse Indian developer community. Amadeus wanted to encourage developers to use their APIs and derive insights on how well developers understood the APIs, how difficult or easy it was to find and use the resources and documentation, and how the APIs were actually leveraged.

Hack the Journey: the hiring challenge

Hack the Journey was a two-stage hiring challenge that required developers to showcase their knowledge by solving challenges.

The first round, which consisted of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), tested candidates’ knowledge of the Amadeus for Developers Self-Service APIs. Top scoring candidates from this round were shortlisted for the second round, where they solved 2 full stack questions using the Amadeus for Developers Self-Service APIs and Amadeus SDKs.

The MCQ and coding questions were created by the Developer Advocate at Amadeus for Developers and the custom questions were then uploaded on the platform for creating the coding challenge. Following this, developers with more than 6 months of experience were invited to the hiring challenge.

With certainty, it can be said that this is only the beginning as India is one of the largest developer communities in the world. That makes it an attractive destination to find talent, bring awareness about our technology and help them build innovative and successful travel solutions.

Anna Tsolakou
Developer Advocate
Amadeus for Developers

The hiring challenge kicked off on December 1st 2022, and on December 5th 2022, developers who finished in the Top 7, and the top scoring woman candidate, were conferred with prizes at the Amadeus Software Labs office in Bengaluru.

The HackerEarth advantage

The objective of the coding challenge was to increase awareness and adoption of the Amadeus for Developer APIs. This called for creating custom questions. With the help of the HackerEarth support team, the Amadeus team were able to easily upload custom Python and Node.js questions, and the challenge was set-up within the planned timelines.

After setting up the challenge, the Amadeus team then tested out the challenge with unit test cases. Once everything was in place and verified, the HackerEarth team sent out the challenge to all the participants.

The features that were most appreciated by the Amadeus team were the automated evaluation feature, the detailed report, and the candidate leaderboard. With HackerEarth, the team could easily examine the results of the MCQ and coding questions, which enabled them to shortlist the top candidates with ease.

Further, the team could also manually check individual candidate reports of the top 3 performers and verify that the APIs were used, as required.

Outcome

Without the automated evaluation, evaluating the submissions of each of the 200+ shortlisted candidates, and running them through the unit test case would have taken over 6.5 hours.

However, thanks to HackerEarth, the team could effortlessly evaluate candidate performance, and also track how much time candidates took to complete the code, the efficiency of the code, the code quality, and could ensure that no plagiarism was committed. This ensured that the winning candidates actually wrote the best codes.

The platform has proved a great way to review in an automatic way the submissions. It helped to quickly showcase the number of developers and results gathered towards an efficient decision-making to identify the winners. Also, we were able to bring awareness to the Indian market since thousands of developers participated in the challenge.