no, doesn't sound ideal to me. you probably don't need a take-home. how much time are you expecting / "giving" candidates to work on these take-home programmi

no, doesn't sound ideal to me. you probably don't need a take-home. how much time are you expecting / "giving" candidates to work on these take-home programming tests? it sounds like you're wasting lots of people's time by putting a gap in between your certitude that someone who finishes in X amount of time will be hired and not "fail later", and the Y amount of time total. If you're not going to hire someone beyond the X value, you need to downward adjust your Y until it is the X. Otherwise you're literally wasting people's time. No, that's not ideal. Also: do you pay them for their time?