How LEAP Turned a Recruitment Question Into a Yearly Aviation Hackathon Together With Milkman®

It started as a recruitment question. More people were needed, and specifically people from outside aviation: talent that looks at a problem differently than the industry is used to, rather than more of the same.

‍

The catch: those people do not read aviation media, do not scroll aviation job boards and have no reason to think aviation needs them. A vacancy would never reach them. They needed a reason to come in.

So we did not write a job ad. We designed a hackathon: 24 hours, one real aviation challenge, teams that mix aviation, AI and finance. Every year a new challenge, so it becomes a moment people return to instead of a one-off stunt.

‍

And we gave it a name of its own. LEAP works as a label rather than a campaign line, so the challenge can stand on its own and come back every year. Nobody applies for a job here. They sign up for a challenge.

Visually, we moved away from the familiar aviation look. LEAP got an experimental, cinematic identity that borrows from technology and AI rather than from airports and aircraft. One shoot became a campaign film and a stream of platform-native assets, and the identity runs through every touchpoint, down to the invites and the keychain.

‍

Everything carries one message:

‍

The future of aviation will be built by people who don’t all come from aviation.

LEAP runs as a platform rather than an event page: a landing page that explains the challenge, a nurturing sequence that keeps every sign-up warm, and an always-on campaign that sends new visitors to it every week.

‍

It was set up to do one thing: collect the people a vacancy would never reach, and keep them close until the next edition opens.

LEAP asks outsiders to solve an insider’s problem: aircraft availability. So we gave it a picture everyone already knows. In Formula One, 1.8 seconds can decide a race. In aviation, every hour an aircraft spends on the ground is lost. Framed as a pit stop, ground time turned from an aviation detail into a problem a data scientist or a finance graduate wanted to crack.

LEAP was never meant to happen once. Every year brings a new challenge under the same label, on the same platform, so each edition starts with an audience that already knows it instead of starting from zero.