October 2026 · Issue 02
Six hours is a fairly unforgiving deadline for building something useful. You can spend a good part of it deciding what the thing should actually do.
On 8 October 2026, teams at Firepool Centre in Taunton worked on Career Access prototypes. The brief covered CV and vacancy matching, interview preparation and career pathways, all connected to a practical problem: helping people find their way into the UK labour market.
Career Access is part of CulturaLinks Community CIC’s work. Nexus Innovation Hub Ltd supported the hackathon as a sponsor, alongside support from ElevenLabs.
I was genuinely impressed by what the teams managed to build in six hours. There were working demonstrations to examine and different approaches to the same challenge. That gives us something much more useful to discuss than an idea on its own.
The overall winners were Akanksha Ankath and Dharan. Yannick Grundy, Mihir Bapat and Tausifraza won the Best Project Built with ElevenLabs award.
The ElevenLabs category winners shared a working demonstration of their Career Agent and its GitHub source code. They also flagged limitations caused by restricted computing resources and API access. Those limitations matter when deciding what can be tested now and what needs more development.
ElevenLabs agreed to provide one month of Creator access for eligible registered participants. Its prize support included three months of Pro access per member of the overall winning team and three months of Scale access per member of the Best Project Built with ElevenLabs team.
For Career Access, the work after the hackathon matters as much as the day itself.
A tool that compares a CV with a vacancy needs to explain its suggestions clearly. Someone should be able to understand why a role might suit them, where their experience fits and what they may need to work on. Interview practice needs to help with the answers a person actually gives. Advice about working in the UK needs reliable sources and clear boundaries.
These are things to check with users. A convincing demonstration does not tell us whether someone will understand the tool without its developer sitting beside them.
The prototypes give us a starting point for that testing. We can examine the code, try the demonstrations and identify what needs further work before a Career Access pilot.
Thank you to the participants, mentors and judges who gave their time, and to ElevenLabs and Nexus Innovation Hub Ltd for supporting the event.
The awards recognised what the teams achieved that day. The next test is whether the tools help someone facing a real career barrier. There is more work to do, and now we have something concrete to work on.
