Last weekend, Chicago-area tech pros came together with CareerBuilder and 1871 to hack out solutions to the more than 12 million people unemployed. Given there are more 3.5 million unfilled jobs, despite unemployment, attendees were prompted to identify and start to develop solutions to match the right talent with the right company and to help empower employment.

The caliber of ideas and solutions were astounding!

There were more ideas than there were teams to execute (with one attendee literally continuing to pitch ideas to teams as he walked off stage). All in all, there were six final ideas presented to judges, including CareerBuilder’s CBDO Hope Gurion. Here are the winners:

• Overall winner was PinJobs, a job-matching application based on job-seekers selecting images to capture preferences and connect them to promising opportunities, the team was led by the co-founders of Better Weekdays, a member of 1871.

• Best use of the API was Open Circles, an app that uses a social layer to find jobs at your friends’ companies, then easily helps you get in touch to ask for an introduction.

• Most viable product award went to The Pitch, a marketplace for nontraditional candidates to collect and pitch the skills and experience that make them uniquely qualified for a desired position. The Pitch team was largely comprised of Starter League students.

Of the three winners, at least two have current plant to pull the ideas through into full-featured web apps.

The judges from CareerBuilder were entirely impressed with the entire field of participants. As far as we’re concerned, the more people creating solutions to unemployment, the better off we’ll all be. And we had some great solutions developed this weekend.

Let us know your thoughts or questions.