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Sit down for a week with each candidate, perhaps with all candidates, in a hackathon. Solving a real world problem. Then you can see who is worth what, their st
by albertcardona 18y ago
Sit down for a week with each candidate, perhaps with all candidates, in a hackathon. Solving a real world problem. Then you can see who is worth what, their strong points, their weaknesses. It costs you time, but it's --in my experience-- worth every minute spent.
- jm4 18y agoSo how many week-long interviews are you planning to attend? I don't doubt that this would work in a perfect world, but it's going to be difficult finding candidates willing to go through with it. Right off the bat you're going to have a severely limited pool of talent to choose from. It's also important to think about what kind of candidates would be up for this. They obviously wouldn't already have jobs and that could be for a variety of reasons - good or bad. These candidates would likely have to put off other interviews for a week, assuming they have other leads. Would you pay candidates during this interview process? That's going to have an effect on the types of people you can bring in for consideration. My guess is that in the end you're going to have just as many difficulties finding a suitable candidate.
- albertcardona 18y agoAll the problems you bring up are real. Perhaps the hack-together approach could be rephrased as a screening stage, not a hiring stage. No point in blindly hiring people after testing them with some random, one-day stressful sessions. (It's like scoring students with exams; makes no sense at all, when an informal oral exam would really tell you how much the student knows. Scoring students while having a beer with them may not be conventional, yet my former PhD advisor used that as a pre-screen for hiring new grads.)