How I Executed a Successful React Hiring Walk-in Campaign: From Zero to Three Hires in One Day

We were walking into uncharted terrain as a tiny brand that had never been to Coimbatore before. And the demand on us - do not return empty-handed. When we came back with three solid hires from a single day's walk-in event, we got resounding applause from the founder. 

This was a team effort. I'm capturing what I did and what my colleagues chipped in with to turn this into a recruitment win. Equally important, I'm sharing what we goofed up on and the lessons we learned. The best part was converting anxious interviews into developer fan moments. It’s a lovely contrast to stiff interviews and terse rejection emails that carry no explanation. 

Preparing Ahead

First problem: Our standard React developer job description was way too Bangalore-centric. I'm talking about the usual "fast-paced startup environment" jargon that means nothing to someone in a tier-2 city who's probably already working at a decent company.

I spent some time with AI tools trying to figure out what actually matters to developers in Coimbatore. Turns out, they care way more about mentorship and getting exposure to enterprise-level work than they do about ping pong tables. Who knew?

After three rewrites, I had something that didn't sound like it was written by a corporate robot.

You can read the JD

Visually Appealing Posters

Arun (our designer) and I put together some promotional stuff that looked professional but not intimidating. It had to be relatable.

The LinkedIn post for you to take a look.

Then I asked Nattu (our co-founder) to record a quick video. Just him talking about what we're actually like as a company. No script, no fancy production - just authentic. That video got more views than any of our polished content ever did. You can watch the co-founder's video.

Spreading the Word

LinkedIn, Wellfound, Indeed - I posted everywhere. Different messages for each platform because LinkedIn people think differently than Indeed people, you know?

I didn’t just stop there but combed through groups on Telegram, Reddit and even made employees share the posts. 

What I learned: LinkedIn brought in people who were already employed but curious. Indeed was all volume - lots of responses but mixed quality. Wellfound had the portfolio people, the ones who actually had GitHub accounts they weren't embarrassed to share.

The Phone Call Marathon

Seventy five phone calls in one week. 

I had a simple scoring thing going - technical basics, can they actually show up, do they seem like they'd fit with us. Fifteen minutes each call, max.

In retrospect, here's what I figured out: the candidates who asked me specific questions about our tech stack? They were the ones who'd actually show up. The ones who just said "okay" to everything? Most of them ghosted.

The Big Day

Fifteen people showed up. Out of 28 who confirmed. Honestly, 53% attendance for a walk-in? I was thrilled.

We set up the process where everyone got the same coding challenge through GitHub Classroom, but our tech team was right there doing live code reviews. Forty-five minutes per person - thirty minutes coding, fifteen minutes chatting about what they saw.

What Actually Made the Difference

Here's what nobody expected, including me: 

After the coding challenge, our team huddled together and came up with a brilliant idea. Instead of evaluating code in isolation and then doing interviews, our senior developers wanted to give candidates an opportunity to talk through their logic and explain their code. 

So, our tech team spent 15 minutes with each candidate. Not grilling them, just hearing their strategy and then explaining what was good and what could be better.

These people came in thinking they'd write some code, leave, and maybe get a generic email later. Instead, they got three senior developers sitting down and actually teaching them something.

One guy - let's call him Candidate #7 - completely struggled with the React hooks part. But the way he talked through his debugging process was so clear and logical that our tech lead was like "we need this person." You don't get that insight from a traditional interview.

Whether we hired them or not, everyone left feeling like they'd learned something. That's what made people talk about us afterward.

Standardising Hiring Feedback

We came up with an interview feedback template that wasn't a pain for the interviewers to fill out. Just numbers and checkboxes mostly, but it captured everything we needed to compare people fairly.

You can take a look at the feedback form I designed

By the end of the day, we had clean data on all 15 people instead of just gut feelings and whoever we happened to remember best.

Goof Ups and Learnings

We forgot to arrange lunch. Just... forgot. These people were there for four hours and we didn't feed them. I'm still mortified about this. Next time, food is the first thing on the list.

The Math

One day, 15 people, 3 hires. Cost us 60% less than our usual agency route, and we went from needing 10-12 weeks to fill positions to having people ready to start in 6-8 weeks.

The hiring related win showed that our normal hiring process was missing a lot. 

1. People in tier-2 cities respond way better when there is an in person connection.
2. Live coding tells you more than those take-home projects. 
3. On the spot show n tell reviews help establish a connection and the clear thinkers emerged beautifully. 
4. The real win was this: Three candidates actually expressed how much they enjoyed this walk-in. It was like we had demonstrated our company culture (care first code next) quite eloquently through this recruitment exercise. If someone says “Not sure if you will hire me, but I totally enjoyed meeting seniors and learnt very much on great coding practices”. And it was not an isolated experience, I can vouch for that. 

In conclusion

I've been handling more and more of these cross-functional projects lately - this recruitment thing, an SEO project, building and launching a web application. Each one has completely different stakeholders and challenges, but I'm starting to see the pattern.

It's all about understanding what you're actually trying to achieve, breaking it down into manageable pieces, and making sure everyone knows what success looks like. Whether you're hiring developers or delivering a project, the basics are the same.

The confidence boost from pulling these things off is real.