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> Sure, as the author notes, WBI have a high false negative rate. That's why this practice should be abandoned. Give the candidates a small, two dayish homewor
by kowdermeister 9y ago
> Sure, as the author notes, WBI have a high false negative rate.
That's why this practice should be abandoned. Give the candidates a small, two dayish homework that reveals their ability to do their would-be daily jobs. If it looks good, call them in and talk about their submission. Heck, you might even ask them do draw some diagrams or detailed explanation of their own solution.
- frandroid 9y agoCandidates that have offers from other companies that didn't ask them for homework will probably go for these companies first. We scheduled 8 people for interviews last week and 2 of them dropped out before their scheduled interview times because they took jobs elsewhere. Unless you're a top-tier tech employer, you don't have the luxury of asking candidates to do leg work.
- akras14 9y agoYes, this 100% imho
- cholantesh 9y agoMany candidates also interpret this as an attempt to get free work out of them, too. I personally don't mind them, so long as they're well-designed.
- kowdermeister 9y agoThese assignments are tasks that are no way could be used in production, at better places these are even paid assignments. I've seen more than one ad like that.
- kowdermeister 9y agoSmall companies do it here (Europe), not sure about the US. I would happily do the leg work if I really dig the company. If they drop out from the queue, they probably prioritized you lower, not a big loss.
- sigsergv 9y agoA friend of mine got absolutely amazing task from one company: write and publish on github extension to LLVM. It was some really simple language, nothing practical, but this whole task tests so much skills so my friend was really enjoyed doing it.
- smallnamespace 9y ago> That's why this practice should be abandoned. Not if the cost of a false positive is much higher than the cost of a false negative, which for many employers seems like the likely case.
- flukus 9y ago> That's why this practice should be abandoned. Give the candidates a small, two dayish homework that reveals their ability to do their would-be daily jobs. I find the opposite. Most real world projects require a week or two of infrastructure setup (logging, error handling, IOC setup, database setup, etc) that you won't have in the two day version, yet in my experience most companies will grade you on the lack of such things. Also, anyone already employed isn't going to invest that much time, which largely limits your candidate pool to employees no one else will hire.