Evolving a recruitment challenge into a recurring global platform for talent discovery

Turning a one-off recruitment campaign into the business-critical intelligent experience platform IMC uses to engage the top 1% of STEM talent.

The best trading talent doesn’t respond to a job ad

IMC is a leading global market maker in a highly competitive field that demands a constant influx of top-tier talent. Specifically, STEM graduates from the very best universities around the world. Competing for that talent means going head-to-head with some of the most attractive employers on the planet. To win, IMC wanted candidates to feel the real complexity, pressure, and inventiveness of algorithmic trading, a genuine test of capability in engineering, mathematics, strategic thinking, and creativity.

A trading floor proves what a resume only claims

Working through the brief with IMC, we found that filtering candidates on CVs alone would miss exactly the people IMC wanted: the ones who collaborate well, think strategically, adapt fast, and perform under pressure. Together, we made the call to build something beyond a campaign; a real market simulation players could enter with their own algorithms.

Prosperity, a platform now in its fourth edition

Hypersolid designed and built Prosperity in close collaboration with IMC, from early concept through platform development and global rollout, continuing a partnership that has run since 2021 with no existing blueprint to follow.

What was delivered on the experience side:

• A space-inspired narrative universe of distant planets, volatile markets, and scarce resources
• Strategy, storytelling, UX, and visual design shaping the world and the experience
• A reimagined space theme, new storylines, and a brand-new visual direction for the fourth edition

On the tech side, we developed the following:

• A global, team-based trading platform where players deploy self-built algorithms inside a simulated market
• Full-stack development, data, and security powering the platform behind the challenge
• IMC’s own trading experts shaping the algorithmic and manual trading challenge logic and the realism of the market simulation
• Generative AI supporting content production across in-game assets, trailers, and campaign visuals
• The platform was built to evolve every year rather than restart from a blueprint each edition

A recurring platform with its own community

Prosperity has evolved from a single activation into a recurring platform on IMC’s annual agenda, each edition more refined, more ambitious, and more technologically advanced than the last. Across its editions, more than 30,000 players and 18,000 teams from over 117 countries have competed, a scale that turns a recruitment activation into a genuine global talent pool. It does not just create attention around the brand, it uncovers talent through participation, performance, and curiosity.

In its very first edition, 94% of participants said they'd consider a career in trading afterward, proof that the platform doesn't just attract attention, it converts it. A highly engaged community has grown up around it: players trade tactics in Discord, where IMC experts join the discussion, build tutorials on GitHub, and reference their results on LinkedIn as proof of skill.

IMC and Hypersolid started this in 2021 without a blueprint to follow. Four editions later, Prosperity is the platform IMC returns to every year to find the people who don’t need convincing. They find their way in.