3 ms·

I used to do a lot of interviews for front-end engineers. The process I settled on was to give them the following setup: - some mock-ups from when we first des

I used to do a lot of interviews for front-end engineers. The process I settled on was to give them the following setup: - some mock-ups from when we first designed our product gallery - a json file that listed the products names, pictures, description, etc. - a blank css file - a html file that loaded the css and jQuery, and then made an ajax request to load the json file. (This was back when jQuery was pretty much state of the art for front-end.) With all of that in place, I'd explain that I'd like them to work on building a product gallery that looked similar to the mockups. I would further explain that, since we only had an hour, I didn't expect a polished or even fully functional product, but I'd just like them to dive in and see how far they got. They could use their editor of choice and ask any questions they wanted. I felt like this gave better insight to candidates skill and workflow. My colleagues all gave more traditional interviews, so I also felt like there was a good counterbalance if someone didn't do well with this kind of interview.

xxbondsxx 10y ago
Doesn't that heavily bias towards candidates who have used jQuery before and/or built a product gallery before? Skewing interview performance based on some specific previous experience might be what you want if you expect your candidates to hit the ground running, but might not be the best to gauge long-term performance.
- nfriedly 10y ago
  This was back in the day when everyone used jQuery for everything, and the company was only looking for experienced people, so a candidate who hadn't used jQuery before probably wouldn't have been a good match for the position anyways. I don't think a single candidate had that issue though. As far as the product gallery goes, I wasn't looking for a pixel-perfect product. Just spit out a bit of html and matching CSS that look vaguely like the mockup. The mockup images had things like the hex values of the colors written on the image to make that part easy. Basically, it was trying to focus on things that would be the main part of the candidate's job there. The folks that we did hire all did well on both that interview and long-term at the company.

xxbondsxx 10y ago

Doesn't that heavily bias towards candidates who have used jQuery before and/or built a product gallery before? Skewing interview performance based on some specific previous experience might be what you want if you expect your candidates to hit the ground running, but might not be the best to gauge long-term performance.

nfriedly 10y ago
This was back in the day when everyone used jQuery for everything, and the company was only looking for experienced people, so a candidate who hadn't used jQuery before probably wouldn't have been a good match for the position anyways. I don't think a single candidate had that issue though. As far as the product gallery goes, I wasn't looking for a pixel-perfect product. Just spit out a bit of html and matching CSS that look vaguely like the mockup. The mockup images had things like the hex values of the colors written on the image to make that part easy. Basically, it was trying to focus on things that would be the main part of the candidate's job there. The folks that we did hire all did well on both that interview and long-term at the company.