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> The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. ... only for the 1-2 top c

> The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job. ... only for the 1-2 top companies they are interviewing for. I have discontinued multiple interviews because they demanded 4-5 evenings of work for free on short notice, if I am going to spend 10-20 hours per company I have to take two weeks off from my current work to do it. On the other hand I have done the required work if I really want to join a company, but they are only top 5%. Another problem is, usually what is expected and how the project will be judged is not mentioned beforehand; - so do I write unit tests? - do you want docs for running it? - should it include deployment instructions/code? - does have to support 5000 req/s? - how important is clean code for this? each add more time and these kind of question are never ending. So unless you are Stripe, Airbnb, Netflix, etc. (Very strong Engineering and better than average culture), I will not bother, will say thank you and be on my way. Finally, let's say you have done the project and they reject you, they never put a fraction of the time you spent to give you feedback. because that means a lot of time they will spend on someone that will not be hired. Also might open the way for litigation for discrimination in some countries etc. On the other hand; Once I was managing hiring process of a new grad where we asked her to design a FE+BE system, after receiving it I spent a couple of hours reviewing it, we decided to hire her, she was very enthusiastic and smart, I also sent her our notes and how she can improve the project. Her response was along the lines of "even if you don't hire me I am very grateful for doing the project, did learn a lot" She joined and quickly became a very productive colleague. Edit: I noticed that the author mentions they keep in touch during the project and provide a code review, had not seen that yet while writing the comment. In that case it makes sense, but the candidate should know they will receive feedback even if they fail which I believe is hard for the team to accomplish but kudos if they did manage to do it.

lonelappde 7y ago
Great story. Instead of looking as recruiting as a cost center, make it a marketing investment. Spend hours with someone, give them a good experience, make them an ambassador for your brand and an external sourcer for their friends and their future self. Use them as practice for your staff to get better as communicators, mentors, code reviewers.
- kamyarg 7y ago
  Yes, exactly. This is also a double-edged sword, if the experience is horrible, you can be sure none of their classmates will apply to you or even their school if you blew it exceptionally. There is an article by Joel Spolsky about Hiring great engineers that touches on this point also: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve... > Even though only about one in three applicants who make it to the in-person interview stage passes all our interviews, it’s really important that the ones that do pass have a positive experience. Even the ones that don’t make it go back to campus thinking we’re a classy employer and tell all their friends how much fun they had staying in a luxury hotel in the Big Apple, which makes their friends apply for an internship the next summer, if only for the chance at the trip.
mayop100 7y ago
[author here] I actually agree with your thesis! You're right that candidates are only willing to put in this level of effort if they are really interested and consider your company a "top 5%" big opportunity. So it's critical that you convince them that you are in that top 5%! You don't want an employee to join you because their top choices turned them down -- you want to be their first choice. We regularly won candidates away from Google, Facebook, Uber, Twitter, etc. If you want to build a great team, you're going to need to be able to do this too. Re: code reviews -- yes, we gave everyone a thorough code review.
- ses1984 7y ago
  >You don't want an employee to join you because their top choices turned them down -- you want to be their first choice. Why? Unless you're offering FAANG levels of compensation, isn't it pretty arrogant to think you're anyone's top choice? Candidates can easily lie to you about this. In fact in my last job hunt I was instructed to lie about this by recruiters who are actually being paid by the company I'm lying to. I told every company I interviewed at they were my top choice.
  - mayop100 7y ago
    Well, then perhaps the test is working as intended! Candidates who aren't sufficiently excited about your company will drop out at this stage.
    - ses1984 7y ago
      This doesn't make any sense. Your intention is to get candidates to fake excitement or drop out?
      - tragic 7y ago
        I think the idea is that it's easy to fake excitement until you're asked to spend six hours on a take home test. At which point you'd actually have to be pretty excited to do it.
PragmaticPulp 7y ago
> I have discontinued multiple interviews because they demanded 4-5 evenings of work for free on short notice, if I am going to spend 10-20 hours per company I have to take two weeks off from my current work to do it. Honest question: Would you feel differently if these companies had 1-2 days of onsite technical interviewing instead of take-home problems? In practice, I rarely get pushback from candidates for our 4-hour take-home problem. We provide clear instructions about expectations, constraints, and boundaries. All candidates have thanked us for allowing them to work on their own time in their own coding environments.
- davinic 7y ago
  I would, because interviews require someone from the other organization to be there. Time is a valuable resource, and as long as the employer is showing their commitment, I have no problem reciprocating. Skin in the game is the key.
  - twic 7y ago
    Why does "skin in the game" matter? Why is that a useful signal about whether this company will be a good employer or not?
    - Doxin 7y ago
      It's not a useful signal about if they are a good employer, but it is a good signal for how likely they are to hire you: asking everyone who applies to take several hours out of their life to do your test is free. Having someone from your team interview them for several hours very much is not so you'll be more careful selecting candidates you might actually hire instead of just taking a shotgun approach.
      - ProZsolt 7y ago
        For me it's a useful signal, it means they value my time equally as theirs. I'm happy to do the take-home test after the onsite one when they only testing that I really know what I said I know but I'm at the finish line. A lot of companies require it right after the phone screening(usually with an HR person who knows nothing). I burned myself that way before. After finishing the take home test on the on site interview after 5 minutes it was clear they were looking for an ops person advertised as DevOps.
graphememes 7y ago
As someone who has given take-home tests let me answer these for you: - Unit tests? Yes. It will increase your standing. - Docs? Absolutely. A must have. You will not be considered really otherwise. - Deployment? See above. - Support 5k requests? Not unless that is what the test is testing for, pay attention during phone interview about the role and it's requirements, the test will look for this and other generalizations. - Clean code? Very, very important. Don't try to show how smart you are, show how audience aware you are. Most likely you will be working on a team, a team doesn't want a cowboy programmer. Something you didn't mention but bodes really well for anything with a front-end interface: hosting. Executives hate running things themselves, so a hosted version will put you at the top of the list.
- mjfisher 7y ago
  It's probably worth mentioning that any take home worth its salt will explicitly list what criteria you're being assessed on. It's crazy how many coding tests are poorly designed and waste a candidate's time. I'm putting together a list of good practice for test design here: https://candidatecode.com/articles/coding_challenge_best_practice_checklist https://candidatecode.com/articles/coding_challenge_best_pra... Feedback and contributions welcome
  - graphememes 7y ago
    A lot of the time they are left out to see how experienced the individual is working in the environment. What do they think is the most important (outside of the outlined criteria)? Treat it as if they are testing your experience, not your literal skill in pumping out code. Anyone can pump out code.
    - mjfisher 7y ago
      The issue there is the problem starts to become unbounded for the candidate; they can't tell what you're looking for, so they don't know how to prioritize their time. That's a problem even if you have reasonable expectations yourself, because the candidate probably has experienced some tests where the expectations haven't been reasonable. For a (real) example: marking candidates down for not having an analytics integration. How does your candidate know that's not important to you, even though it was important to the last company? > testing your experience, not your literal skill in pumping out code Past a certain point, it gets much more efficient to discuss experience in an interview setting. Good coding tests should be designed to test the skills you care about most to produce a strong hiring signal for the next phase - it's difficult to showcase a full decade's worth of experience in 4-8 hours' worth of coding challenge. > Anyone can pump out code I've found that to be depressingly untrue amongst a significant percentage of engineering applicants.

lonelappde 7y ago

Great story. Instead of looking as recruiting as a cost center, make it a marketing investment. Spend hours with someone, give them a good experience, make them an ambassador for your brand and an external sourcer for their friends and their future self. Use them as practice for your staff to get better as communicators, mentors, code reviewers.

kamyarg 7y ago
Yes, exactly. This is also a double-edged sword, if the experience is horrible, you can be sure none of their classmates will apply to you or even their school if you blew it exceptionally. There is an article by Joel Spolsky about Hiring great engineers that touches on this point also: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve... > Even though only about one in three applicants who make it to the in-person interview stage passes all our interviews, it’s really important that the ones that do pass have a positive experience. Even the ones that don’t make it go back to campus thinking we’re a classy employer and tell all their friends how much fun they had staying in a luxury hotel in the Big Apple, which makes their friends apply for an internship the next summer, if only for the chance at the trip.

mayop100 7y ago

[author here] I actually agree with your thesis! You're right that candidates are only willing to put in this level of effort if they are really interested and consider your company a "top 5%" big opportunity. So it's critical that you convince them that you are in that top 5%! You don't want an employee to join you because their top choices turned them down -- you want to be their first choice. We regularly won candidates away from Google, Facebook, Uber, Twitter, etc. If you want to build a great team, you're going to need to be able to do this too. Re: code reviews -- yes, we gave everyone a thorough code review.

ses1984 7y ago
>You don't want an employee to join you because their top choices turned them down -- you want to be their first choice. Why? Unless you're offering FAANG levels of compensation, isn't it pretty arrogant to think you're anyone's top choice? Candidates can easily lie to you about this. In fact in my last job hunt I was instructed to lie about this by recruiters who are actually being paid by the company I'm lying to. I told every company I interviewed at they were my top choice.
- mayop100 7y ago
  Well, then perhaps the test is working as intended! Candidates who aren't sufficiently excited about your company will drop out at this stage.
  - ses1984 7y ago
    This doesn't make any sense. Your intention is to get candidates to fake excitement or drop out?
    - tragic 7y ago
      I think the idea is that it's easy to fake excitement until you're asked to spend six hours on a take home test. At which point you'd actually have to be pretty excited to do it.

PragmaticPulp 7y ago

> I have discontinued multiple interviews because they demanded 4-5 evenings of work for free on short notice, if I am going to spend 10-20 hours per company I have to take two weeks off from my current work to do it. Honest question: Would you feel differently if these companies had 1-2 days of onsite technical interviewing instead of take-home problems? In practice, I rarely get pushback from candidates for our 4-hour take-home problem. We provide clear instructions about expectations, constraints, and boundaries. All candidates have thanked us for allowing them to work on their own time in their own coding environments.

davinic 7y ago
I would, because interviews require someone from the other organization to be there. Time is a valuable resource, and as long as the employer is showing their commitment, I have no problem reciprocating. Skin in the game is the key.
- twic 7y ago
  Why does "skin in the game" matter? Why is that a useful signal about whether this company will be a good employer or not?
  - Doxin 7y ago
    It's not a useful signal about if they are a good employer, but it is a good signal for how likely they are to hire you: asking everyone who applies to take several hours out of their life to do your test is free. Having someone from your team interview them for several hours very much is not so you'll be more careful selecting candidates you might actually hire instead of just taking a shotgun approach.
    - ProZsolt 7y ago
      For me it's a useful signal, it means they value my time equally as theirs. I'm happy to do the take-home test after the onsite one when they only testing that I really know what I said I know but I'm at the finish line. A lot of companies require it right after the phone screening(usually with an HR person who knows nothing). I burned myself that way before. After finishing the take home test on the on site interview after 5 minutes it was clear they were looking for an ops person advertised as DevOps.

graphememes 7y ago

As someone who has given take-home tests let me answer these for you: - Unit tests? Yes. It will increase your standing. - Docs? Absolutely. A must have. You will not be considered really otherwise. - Deployment? See above. - Support 5k requests? Not unless that is what the test is testing for, pay attention during phone interview about the role and it's requirements, the test will look for this and other generalizations. - Clean code? Very, very important. Don't try to show how smart you are, show how audience aware you are. Most likely you will be working on a team, a team doesn't want a cowboy programmer. Something you didn't mention but bodes really well for anything with a front-end interface: hosting. Executives hate running things themselves, so a hosted version will put you at the top of the list.

mjfisher 7y ago
It's probably worth mentioning that any take home worth its salt will explicitly list what criteria you're being assessed on. It's crazy how many coding tests are poorly designed and waste a candidate's time. I'm putting together a list of good practice for test design here: https://candidatecode.com/articles/coding_challenge_best_practice_checklist https://candidatecode.com/articles/coding_challenge_best_pra... Feedback and contributions welcome
- graphememes 7y ago
  A lot of the time they are left out to see how experienced the individual is working in the environment. What do they think is the most important (outside of the outlined criteria)? Treat it as if they are testing your experience, not your literal skill in pumping out code. Anyone can pump out code.
  - mjfisher 7y ago
    The issue there is the problem starts to become unbounded for the candidate; they can't tell what you're looking for, so they don't know how to prioritize their time. That's a problem even if you have reasonable expectations yourself, because the candidate probably has experienced some tests where the expectations haven't been reasonable. For a (real) example: marking candidates down for not having an analytics integration. How does your candidate know that's not important to you, even though it was important to the last company? > testing your experience, not your literal skill in pumping out code Past a certain point, it gets much more efficient to discuss experience in an interview setting. Good coding tests should be designed to test the skills you care about most to produce a strong hiring signal for the next phase - it's difficult to showcase a full decade's worth of experience in 4-8 hours' worth of coding challenge. > Anyone can pump out code I've found that to be depressingly untrue amongst a significant percentage of engineering applicants.