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I've tried work-sample testing with middling results: -The more hoops a candidate has to jump through, the more likely they are to bail out of your recruiting

I've tried work-sample testing with middling results: -The more hoops a candidate has to jump through, the more likely they are to bail out of your recruiting funnel. This is especially bad for college/postgrad recruiting when you aren't the #1 employer in your field. Everyone wants to work for the Googles and Facebooks of the world. It's hard getting someone to spend a couple hours for your startup job. -People cheat. We usually issue a short coding project, grade for correctness, then do a code review over Skype or face-to-face. Many candidates turn in the exact same responses. I've even seen people cheat and have a friend do the Skype session with a totally different guy flying out. Do you proctor your test in a secure center? Use an online service to lock down their machine and record? Both are pretty invasive. Switching up the questions constantly is tough and makes your signal noisier. -Industriousness and raw intellect trump skills/knowledge most of the time. Sure there's a baseline level of skill required to train someone quickly enough, like I wouldn't hire someone who didn't know basic data structures, but work-sample tests are often biased to those with a very specific background. I don't want employees who are great at doing what I need today. I want ones who will be great at figuring out what to do years down the line.

tptacek 10y ago
First: if you make candidates do work sample tests, you should reduce the amount of in-person interviewing you do to account for it. Up to a limit, most candidates would prefer your selection/qualification process to happen from their homes than from your office. Unfortunately, companies aren't serious enough about their tests to trust them, and do indeed tend to make this just another hoop. Second, incorporate the work sample tests into your in-person (or even telephone) interviews. Now you have a (hopefully interesting) technical problem they ostensibly just solved to talk about. Your evaluation should be by formal rubric, not interview, but it's easy to see if someone actually did it. We had no problems at all with people cheating (of people we hired with this process, over about 4 years, we fired not a single one). Finally, I could not be less interested in the kind of amateur psychoanalysis tech interviewers hope they're accomplishing as a side effect of quizzing people about code in their conference rooms.

tptacek 10y ago

First: if you make candidates do work sample tests, you should reduce the amount of in-person interviewing you do to account for it. Up to a limit, most candidates would prefer your selection/qualification process to happen from their homes than from your office. Unfortunately, companies aren't serious enough about their tests to trust them, and do indeed tend to make this just another hoop. Second, incorporate the work sample tests into your in-person (or even telephone) interviews. Now you have a (hopefully interesting) technical problem they ostensibly just solved to talk about. Your evaluation should be by formal rubric, not interview, but it's easy to see if someone actually did it. We had no problems at all with people cheating (of people we hired with this process, over about 4 years, we fired not a single one). Finally, I could not be less interested in the kind of amateur psychoanalysis tech interviewers hope they're accomplishing as a side effect of quizzing people about code in their conference rooms.