> your time and the candidate’s time is valuable. I don’t want to waste either > Once the current candidates have completed the process and you have a sufficie

> your time and the candidate’s time is valuable. I don’t want to waste either > Once the current candidates have completed the process and you have a sufficient pool of qualified finalists I'm having a hard time reconciling these two statements. Here's some rough math, to put things in perspective. By the time a candidate has "completed the process", they've invested 12 or more unpaid hours. Let's say you've got a pool of 6-11 candidates who have successfully completed the process, and you only offer a position to one of them. Not counting the time initial applicants spent, that's 60-120 of other people's working hours you've burned in exchange for nothing. At normal contracting rates, that's $6000-12000 worth of time or more. If companies have an average pool size of 10 candidates, and only offer the job to one person in the pool, each candidate is probably repeating this process an average of 10 times to get a job, which is a $10000 investment of their time, unpaid. You can say that it's worth it to the candidate, since they're probably getting a six figure job out of it, but consider the fact that under privileged candidates may not be able to afford to spend that much unpaid time on a job search, and some of the most talented candidates are already working full time, and don't have that much free time to spare. I'm not saying candidates should be paid for the interview process, but I am saying that you should carefully consider how much time you're asking a candidate to invest if they're only one person in a pool of candidates. And companies should be clear with candidates about how many other people are being considered at each stage in the process. The math could look something like this; First Stage (Application): 100-1000 candidates * 1 hour invested = 100h Screening: 10 candidates * 1 hour invested = 10h Technical Interview: 5 candidates * 1 hour invested = 5h Take Home Project: 2 candidates * 3 hours invested = 6h Final Selection: 1 candidate, 1 hour invested = 1h = 122 hours of others' unpaid time used But in reality I suspect for many companies it looks more like this; First Stage (Application): 100-1000 candidates * 1 hour invested = 1000h Screening: 20 candidates * 1 hour invested = 20h Technical Interview: 15 candidates * 2 hours invested = 30h Take Home Project: 10 candidates * 20 hours invested = 200h Final Selection: 1 candidate * 1 hour invested = 1h = 1251 hours of others' unpaid time used I'm making some rough assumptions about contracting rates and salary expectations, but that's about the scale of an entire year's worth of a developer's salary in free time just to get a job. It's absurd! TL;DR My math is pretty rough, but companies are NOT respecting candidates time with this form of evaluation.