6 ms·

To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long

To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long series of interviews, etc. What held that back is they also paid a price. Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything.

bbkane 7mo ago
Employers are also inundated by applications so they're applying higher bars to meet as a sort of back pressure. I hate it from the candidates' perspective, but it's not illogical from the employer perspective. No, I don't know how to fix it.
- gedy 7mo ago
  In the end companies don't need to hook up to the sewer pipe that floods applications. What worked in past was (heaven forbid) technical hiring manager looking at resumes, etc and reaching out to clearly qualified candidates. Not hr 20-somethings with humanities degrees. Sorry
- nitwit005 7mo ago
  Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard. It's quite rare for companies to have evidence to support their hiring methods, which unfortunately means it's heavily driven by trends.
  - tmoertel 7mo ago
    > Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you[r] bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard. I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate: What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted candidates you must evaluate to find the few wanted candidates in the crowd of applicants. And what's the fix? It's better screening. Which is raising your bar, isn't it? Even if it's only to add cargo-cult screens to your bar, it's making the bar more selective, isn't it? Fewer people clear it, right?
    - nitwit005 7mo ago
      Arbitrary filtering of candidates is always an option, but then you may as well do it as cheaply as possible. Throw out half the resumes.
      - dwohnitmok 7mo ago
        Arbitrary filtering of candidates doesn't reduce the effort that it takes. Let's say 1 out of 1000 of the candidates you see is what you need. The total amount of effort to find the right candidate is still the same. But throwing out half the resumes just doubles the amount of time until you find the candidate you need (you just spread lower effort over a longer time). On the other hand if you "raise your bar" (let's say you do so by some method that makes it twice as expensive to judge a candidate; twice as likely to reject a candidate that would fit what you need, i.e. doubles your false negative rate; but cuts down on the number of applications by 10x, so that now 1 out of 100 candidates are what you need, which isn't that far off the mark for certain kinds of things), you cut down the effort (and time) you need to spend on finding a candidate by over double. EDIT: On reflection I think we're mainly talking past each other. You are thinking of a scenario where all stages take roughly the same amount of effort/time, whereas tmorel and I are thinking of a scenario where different stages take different amounts of effort/time. If you "raise the bar" on the stages that take less amount of effort/time (assuming that those stages still have some amount of selection usefulness) then you will reduce the overall amount of time/energy spent on hiring someone that meets your final bar.
        nitwit005 7mo ago
        I wasn't suggesting arbitrarily removing candidates was a good idea, but simply responding to their specific devils advocate example of applying "cargo cult screens", which would presumably be arbitrary.
      - tmoertel 7mo ago
        I wasn't suggesting arbitrary filtering. That's a straw-man interpretation of what I wrote. Even if a firm cargo-cult copies the screening practices of the big-tech firms, they are going to be much better at selecting good hires than arbitrary filtering would.
- RobotToaster 7mo ago
  Require paper application. If someone has to pay for a stamp it will stop spam applications.
  - deathanatos 7mo ago
    … needing to pay for postage hardly stops the spam I receive in my own mail. Even the most trivially absurd stuff, like "install rooftop solar" — I don't own a roof.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - RobotToaster 7mo ago
      Mass mailing usually gets a hefty bulk discount.
- sds357 7mo ago
  Maybe we should go back to show up in person to drop off your resume
  - ccosky 7mo ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if eventually hiring becomes heavily dependent on personal referrals. That way you know you're at least dealing with a real person and not a bot, a North Korean trying to infiltrate your company, or someone who isn't even authorized to work in your country.
- tayo42 7mo ago
  Certification process like what Cisco has. All companies attempt to give the same interviews, just have one centralized organization give two programing questions and two system design questions and some kind of proof once you pass it. You filter every one that can't pass the interview in the first place, you get a better interview experience, and just focus on experience
  - singleshot_ 7mo ago
    This sounds an awful lot like a college diploma.
    - tayo42 7mo ago
      Colleges aren't all equal. Professional certifications are different
      - hunterpayne 7mo ago
        Professional certifications have a terrible reputation for good reason. You are perhaps too young to know why this is a silly idea. But its been tried and it failed spectacularly.
        acheron 7mo ago
        It works in essentially every other profession. Programming isn’t that special.
        jjmarr 7mo ago
        In essentially every other profession the credential is gated behind years of work experience and often a degree or course. We already have such a credential. It's called "lasting two years at a FAANG+ without getting fired". If you do that you can get interviews anywhere.
        operatingthetan 7mo ago
- eikenberry 7mo ago
  Smaller companies is one fix. These are almost all problems of fast growth and scale.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
    The problem is that spambots don’t care how big the company is. I know folks that advertised local Office Manager positions for tiny companies, and got hundreds of totally unqualified and unrelated rèsumès, and that was before AI was common. The “good” news, was, that it was pretty easy to bin the spam.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  And why would this be the case? Maybe the solution is to ban AI from the hiring process. This seems like companies being hoisted by their own petard. This is because they are the ones who drove the hiring market to be this way. They are the ones who started using AI in the hiring process. They are the ones who decided to make applying so much work driving applicants to use AI to survive. Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault. PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.
  - encom 7mo ago
    You have invented micro-payments, which has never worked, ever.
    - mistrial9 7mo ago
      micro-payments were sabotaged by existing financial interests on multiple levels
  - switchbak 7mo ago
    > charging $1 to apply for jobs Yeah, I don't see anyone lining up to game that system. Maybe you ought to think about that a little longer than 30 seconds.
  - diacritical 7mo ago
    I wouldn't pay anything to a company I'm applying to, but I would gladly send a small amount of money to a charity and show them the relevant bank or cryptocurrency proof if they explain why they need the micropayment. They could present me with a list of 10 or 10000 charities, I'd pick 1 and put "micropayment for applying to company X" in the comment of the payment. That way I know I'm not giving money to some huge corporation and they know I think applying to their job should at least cost me Y amounts of currency. And if they waste more than an hour of my time with the hiring process, they could similarly pay a charity some money per hour. That was neither me nor the company will feel cheated and in the end, no matter how the hiring turns out, a charity will have benefited.
SchemaLoad 7mo ago
I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, sent before the resume has been reviewed, sent before the company has invested even a minute talking to you. So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.
- suzzer99 7mo ago
  I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.
  - vaginaphobic 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    Outstanding. I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive
    - nitwit005 7mo ago
      Often times people ding you for doing anything different than they're used to, or what they see as "the standard". The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.
      - tharkun__ 7mo ago
        I do think we have to distinguish two things though. It's not really bad to ask someone to do a design session with them and "build their product with them from scratch" isn't inherently bad. That's actually pretty neat if you ask me. What's bad is if there's only a single answer and that's whatever they actually built themselves, which might be a pile of thrown together startup poo that was never cleaned up. But you have the same problem with all sorts of "needless trivia" type questions. And then do you really want to work at a company, where you can't have a proper "pros and cons of different approaches" type of discussion? If you got hired, you'd have those kinds of discussions with them on an ongoing basis. Bad on the company for letting that person do the hiring but they got what they deserved so to speak. Just to make an analogy: If they simply ding you for using 4 spaces coz they use 8, that's bad. If they ask you why you use 4 spaces, they use 8, give them pros and cons and are there any other approaches and what are the pros and cons of those? That's a good interview so to speak. As an interviewer I would give bonus points if the candidate says something like "I used 4 spaces because I thought that's what you guys were probably using coz everyone's moved away from 8 spaces but secretly I love usings tabs and setting tabwidth to what I want but in reality it really really doesn't matter as long as it's consistent across the codebase as humans can get used to almost everything and this one isn't worth fighting over. Linters and formatters exist for a reason".
YesBox 7mo ago
Applicants are using AI too. I've heard from people who hire/post jobs that they gets hundreds to low thousands of applications, and maybe 5% of them have any relevant experience. The problem is the breakdown of trust is costing all of us.
- slumberlust 7mo ago
  The companies have made this bed. They are upset its finally a mor even playing field.
  - hexaga 7mo ago
    Everyone is upset because the situation is a trash fire.
    - stingraycharles 7mo ago
      Yeah, the playing field isn’t leveled as much as it’s simply on fire and turning into garbage. In a way it’s similar to the eternal September, but on a much broader scale.
- tharkun__ 7mo ago
  Using AI for what and is it bad or good? At this point, we think using AI and being able to use AI effectively is a skill in and of itself. When you're hired, you'll have access to AI. You'd be expected to be able to use said AI effectively. So, we still give you a FizzBuzz. You can use AI. Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI. But you have to understand the FizzBuzz and be able to explain it to us and make changes to it "live". The amount of people that get weeded out just by having to explain the code they "coded themselves" is staggering (even pre-AI, even on a take home where you had no "OMG I suck at live coding" pressure).
  - JoshTriplett 7mo ago
    > Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI. You can likely control for that, if you either interview in person or via screen sharing. (Yes, it could be faked, but that's harder.)
hansvm 7mo ago
The last time I was hiring I gave out a take-home test, and I thought it was the opposite of an imposition on candidates' time. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts: - It was designed to be fast to complete (20min max -- not a huge imposition if being hired is likely, obviously very expensive if you're taking one for every job posting). - I only gave them out after a resume screen. If you had a 0% chance then I didn't waste your time. If you had enough other proof of abilities then I skipped the take-home. - Candidates were told that it was designed to be fast and that if they couldn't complete it quickly they were unlikely to be successful interviewing either. They still had the option to spend a lot of time if they thought my assessment of the situation was wrong, but part of the point was to allow candidates to gauge their own abilities and not waste their time interviewing without a chance of being hired. - I did a lot of work behind the scenes calibrating and re-writing the questions individually and as a whole so that the test score correlated very well with interview performance (most interviews administered by not-me, removing a form of bias that's easy to creep in there).
- crobertsbmw 7mo ago
  That seems reasonable. Some employers will hand out 3-6 hour assignments after a candidate’s resumes make it through an AI screening.
- heavyset_go 7mo ago
  For every "20 min max" take home assignment, there will be people who are willing to spend 4+ hours doing it to outshine candidates who have jobs, families and lives. If you want to make it more of a fair consideration of time, consider moving your take home to interviews, that way there isn't a time cost asymmetry. You can enforce your "20 min max" claim this way, you can judge a candidate's performance, thought process and filter out anyone who is LLMing or spending inordinate amounts of time on them. You will also make a better impression on candidates by investing your time in them in the same way they are with you. Maybe you're hiring kids out of college without experience, but you only have to do so many take home tests before you realize that they're a waste of time, and pass on potential employers who throw them at you, or you learn to just send them your hourly rate for the test.
shwetanshu21 7mo ago
Unfortunately this is becoming common in countries like India since there is no other option. We are looking for a mid level DevOps and get like 1000s of application. The requirements were clear we need k8s and IaC exp. But when we went to interview, none of them had production level exp. They told the recruiter that they had who didnt have a way to verify it. After 2-3 interviews like that, I had so start giving them Coderbyte assesments like write a k8s manifests, a Dockerfile and logs parsing. Otherwise, you won't be able to hire.
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  Why don't you just hire people who present as being of normal or better intelligence, and train them on what you need them to do. This is how companies used to do things.
  - koliber 7mo ago
    Sometimes you can pay someone who has done this before, and you're both happy. The person is happy that their experience helps them get a job. The company is happy that you get someone with the needed experience. If I want to hire a driver, I can train someone who does not know how to drive, or hire someone who has experience as a driver. I can do either, but I'd prefer to do the latter in most cases.
    - SoftTalker 7mo ago
      But now you're dealing with a hundred applicants who claim to know how to drive, but actually don't. Either because they never learned, or they aren't capable of it.
      - koliber 7mo ago
        That's why a screening is needed. If people lie, it won't make me lower my standards. I'm dealing with this all the time in recruitment. It can be done. People lie all the time or don't read the requirements. You need a way for the ones who really do know how to do the thing you need to demonstrate it to you. Have you ever been in a situation where you had to hire someone to help you with something? Would you really follow your own advice? Your advice does not make sense for carpenters, cooks, or drivers. Why should it make sense for programmers?
re_chief 7mo ago
> Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything. Wow, this is a great way of putting it. It's draining enough to go to third- and fourth-round interviews with other humans. Doing it with a series of AI chat bots would be devastating!
rimeice 7mo ago
Taking time to figure out if you’re the right fit for the company and the company is the right fit for you is a very good thing. For both parties! Rushed hiring processes increase the chances of you being fired for not being the right fit. Short hiring processes are a massive red flag for me.
- array_key_first 7mo ago
  True, but it becomes a problem when the entire thing is automated. Because then it's entirely one-way. You spend infinite cost and money, they spend nothing. So, you can't even figure out yourself if you're a good fit. It's entirely in their court.

bbkane 7mo ago

Employers are also inundated by applications so they're applying higher bars to meet as a sort of back pressure. I hate it from the candidates' perspective, but it's not illogical from the employer perspective. No, I don't know how to fix it.

gedy 7mo ago
In the end companies don't need to hook up to the sewer pipe that floods applications. What worked in past was (heaven forbid) technical hiring manager looking at resumes, etc and reaching out to clearly qualified candidates. Not hr 20-somethings with humanities degrees. Sorry
nitwit005 7mo ago
Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard. It's quite rare for companies to have evidence to support their hiring methods, which unfortunately means it's heavily driven by trends.
- tmoertel 7mo ago
  > Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you[r] bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard. I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate: What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted candidates you must evaluate to find the few wanted candidates in the crowd of applicants. And what's the fix? It's better screening. Which is raising your bar, isn't it? Even if it's only to add cargo-cult screens to your bar, it's making the bar more selective, isn't it? Fewer people clear it, right?
  - nitwit005 7mo ago
    Arbitrary filtering of candidates is always an option, but then you may as well do it as cheaply as possible. Throw out half the resumes.
    - dwohnitmok 7mo ago
      Arbitrary filtering of candidates doesn't reduce the effort that it takes. Let's say 1 out of 1000 of the candidates you see is what you need. The total amount of effort to find the right candidate is still the same. But throwing out half the resumes just doubles the amount of time until you find the candidate you need (you just spread lower effort over a longer time). On the other hand if you "raise your bar" (let's say you do so by some method that makes it twice as expensive to judge a candidate; twice as likely to reject a candidate that would fit what you need, i.e. doubles your false negative rate; but cuts down on the number of applications by 10x, so that now 1 out of 100 candidates are what you need, which isn't that far off the mark for certain kinds of things), you cut down the effort (and time) you need to spend on finding a candidate by over double. EDIT: On reflection I think we're mainly talking past each other. You are thinking of a scenario where all stages take roughly the same amount of effort/time, whereas tmorel and I are thinking of a scenario where different stages take different amounts of effort/time. If you "raise the bar" on the stages that take less amount of effort/time (assuming that those stages still have some amount of selection usefulness) then you will reduce the overall amount of time/energy spent on hiring someone that meets your final bar.
      - nitwit005 7mo ago
        I wasn't suggesting arbitrarily removing candidates was a good idea, but simply responding to their specific devils advocate example of applying "cargo cult screens", which would presumably be arbitrary.
    - tmoertel 7mo ago
      I wasn't suggesting arbitrary filtering. That's a straw-man interpretation of what I wrote. Even if a firm cargo-cult copies the screening practices of the big-tech firms, they are going to be much better at selecting good hires than arbitrary filtering would.
RobotToaster 7mo ago
Require paper application. If someone has to pay for a stamp it will stop spam applications.
- deathanatos 7mo ago
  … needing to pay for postage hardly stops the spam I receive in my own mail. Even the most trivially absurd stuff, like "install rooftop solar" — I don't own a roof.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - RobotToaster 7mo ago
    Mass mailing usually gets a hefty bulk discount.
sds357 7mo ago
Maybe we should go back to show up in person to drop off your resume
- ccosky 7mo ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if eventually hiring becomes heavily dependent on personal referrals. That way you know you're at least dealing with a real person and not a bot, a North Korean trying to infiltrate your company, or someone who isn't even authorized to work in your country.
tayo42 7mo ago
Certification process like what Cisco has. All companies attempt to give the same interviews, just have one centralized organization give two programing questions and two system design questions and some kind of proof once you pass it. You filter every one that can't pass the interview in the first place, you get a better interview experience, and just focus on experience
- singleshot_ 7mo ago
  This sounds an awful lot like a college diploma.
  - tayo42 7mo ago
    Colleges aren't all equal. Professional certifications are different
    - hunterpayne 7mo ago
      Professional certifications have a terrible reputation for good reason. You are perhaps too young to know why this is a silly idea. But its been tried and it failed spectacularly.
      - acheron 7mo ago
        It works in essentially every other profession. Programming isn’t that special.
        jjmarr 7mo ago
        In essentially every other profession the credential is gated behind years of work experience and often a degree or course. We already have such a credential. It's called "lasting two years at a FAANG+ without getting fired". If you do that you can get interviews anywhere.
        operatingthetan 7mo ago
eikenberry 7mo ago
Smaller companies is one fix. These are almost all problems of fast growth and scale.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  The problem is that spambots don’t care how big the company is. I know folks that advertised local Office Manager positions for tiny companies, and got hundreds of totally unqualified and unrelated rèsumès, and that was before AI was common. The “good” news, was, that it was pretty easy to bin the spam.
hunterpayne 7mo ago
And why would this be the case? Maybe the solution is to ban AI from the hiring process. This seems like companies being hoisted by their own petard. This is because they are the ones who drove the hiring market to be this way. They are the ones who started using AI in the hiring process. They are the ones who decided to make applying so much work driving applicants to use AI to survive. Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault. PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.
- encom 7mo ago
  You have invented micro-payments, which has never worked, ever.
  - mistrial9 7mo ago
    micro-payments were sabotaged by existing financial interests on multiple levels
- switchbak 7mo ago
  > charging $1 to apply for jobs Yeah, I don't see anyone lining up to game that system. Maybe you ought to think about that a little longer than 30 seconds.
- diacritical 7mo ago
  I wouldn't pay anything to a company I'm applying to, but I would gladly send a small amount of money to a charity and show them the relevant bank or cryptocurrency proof if they explain why they need the micropayment. They could present me with a list of 10 or 10000 charities, I'd pick 1 and put "micropayment for applying to company X" in the comment of the payment. That way I know I'm not giving money to some huge corporation and they know I think applying to their job should at least cost me Y amounts of currency. And if they waste more than an hour of my time with the hiring process, they could similarly pay a charity some money per hour. That was neither me nor the company will feel cheated and in the end, no matter how the hiring turns out, a charity will have benefited.

SchemaLoad 7mo ago

I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, sent before the resume has been reviewed, sent before the company has invested even a minute talking to you. So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.

suzzer99 7mo ago
I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.
- vaginaphobic 7mo ago
  [dead]
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  Outstanding. I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive
  - nitwit005 7mo ago
    Often times people ding you for doing anything different than they're used to, or what they see as "the standard". The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.
    - tharkun__ 7mo ago
      I do think we have to distinguish two things though. It's not really bad to ask someone to do a design session with them and "build their product with them from scratch" isn't inherently bad. That's actually pretty neat if you ask me. What's bad is if there's only a single answer and that's whatever they actually built themselves, which might be a pile of thrown together startup poo that was never cleaned up. But you have the same problem with all sorts of "needless trivia" type questions. And then do you really want to work at a company, where you can't have a proper "pros and cons of different approaches" type of discussion? If you got hired, you'd have those kinds of discussions with them on an ongoing basis. Bad on the company for letting that person do the hiring but they got what they deserved so to speak. Just to make an analogy: If they simply ding you for using 4 spaces coz they use 8, that's bad. If they ask you why you use 4 spaces, they use 8, give them pros and cons and are there any other approaches and what are the pros and cons of those? That's a good interview so to speak. As an interviewer I would give bonus points if the candidate says something like "I used 4 spaces because I thought that's what you guys were probably using coz everyone's moved away from 8 spaces but secretly I love usings tabs and setting tabwidth to what I want but in reality it really really doesn't matter as long as it's consistent across the codebase as humans can get used to almost everything and this one isn't worth fighting over. Linters and formatters exist for a reason".

YesBox 7mo ago

Applicants are using AI too. I've heard from people who hire/post jobs that they gets hundreds to low thousands of applications, and maybe 5% of them have any relevant experience. The problem is the breakdown of trust is costing all of us.

slumberlust 7mo ago
The companies have made this bed. They are upset its finally a mor even playing field.
- hexaga 7mo ago
  Everyone is upset because the situation is a trash fire.
  - stingraycharles 7mo ago
    Yeah, the playing field isn’t leveled as much as it’s simply on fire and turning into garbage. In a way it’s similar to the eternal September, but on a much broader scale.
tharkun__ 7mo ago
Using AI for what and is it bad or good? At this point, we think using AI and being able to use AI effectively is a skill in and of itself. When you're hired, you'll have access to AI. You'd be expected to be able to use said AI effectively. So, we still give you a FizzBuzz. You can use AI. Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI. But you have to understand the FizzBuzz and be able to explain it to us and make changes to it "live". The amount of people that get weeded out just by having to explain the code they "coded themselves" is staggering (even pre-AI, even on a take home where you had no "OMG I suck at live coding" pressure).
- JoshTriplett 7mo ago
  > Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI. You can likely control for that, if you either interview in person or via screen sharing. (Yes, it could be faked, but that's harder.)

hansvm 7mo ago

The last time I was hiring I gave out a take-home test, and I thought it was the opposite of an imposition on candidates' time. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts: - It was designed to be fast to complete (20min max -- not a huge imposition if being hired is likely, obviously very expensive if you're taking one for every job posting). - I only gave them out after a resume screen. If you had a 0% chance then I didn't waste your time. If you had enough other proof of abilities then I skipped the take-home. - Candidates were told that it was designed to be fast and that if they couldn't complete it quickly they were unlikely to be successful interviewing either. They still had the option to spend a lot of time if they thought my assessment of the situation was wrong, but part of the point was to allow candidates to gauge their own abilities and not waste their time interviewing without a chance of being hired. - I did a lot of work behind the scenes calibrating and re-writing the questions individually and as a whole so that the test score correlated very well with interview performance (most interviews administered by not-me, removing a form of bias that's easy to creep in there).

crobertsbmw 7mo ago
That seems reasonable. Some employers will hand out 3-6 hour assignments after a candidate’s resumes make it through an AI screening.
heavyset_go 7mo ago
For every "20 min max" take home assignment, there will be people who are willing to spend 4+ hours doing it to outshine candidates who have jobs, families and lives. If you want to make it more of a fair consideration of time, consider moving your take home to interviews, that way there isn't a time cost asymmetry. You can enforce your "20 min max" claim this way, you can judge a candidate's performance, thought process and filter out anyone who is LLMing or spending inordinate amounts of time on them. You will also make a better impression on candidates by investing your time in them in the same way they are with you. Maybe you're hiring kids out of college without experience, but you only have to do so many take home tests before you realize that they're a waste of time, and pass on potential employers who throw them at you, or you learn to just send them your hourly rate for the test.

shwetanshu21 7mo ago

Unfortunately this is becoming common in countries like India since there is no other option. We are looking for a mid level DevOps and get like 1000s of application. The requirements were clear we need k8s and IaC exp. But when we went to interview, none of them had production level exp. They told the recruiter that they had who didnt have a way to verify it. After 2-3 interviews like that, I had so start giving them Coderbyte assesments like write a k8s manifests, a Dockerfile and logs parsing. Otherwise, you won't be able to hire.

SoftTalker 7mo ago
Why don't you just hire people who present as being of normal or better intelligence, and train them on what you need them to do. This is how companies used to do things.
- koliber 7mo ago
  Sometimes you can pay someone who has done this before, and you're both happy. The person is happy that their experience helps them get a job. The company is happy that you get someone with the needed experience. If I want to hire a driver, I can train someone who does not know how to drive, or hire someone who has experience as a driver. I can do either, but I'd prefer to do the latter in most cases.
  - SoftTalker 7mo ago
    But now you're dealing with a hundred applicants who claim to know how to drive, but actually don't. Either because they never learned, or they aren't capable of it.
    - koliber 7mo ago
      That's why a screening is needed. If people lie, it won't make me lower my standards. I'm dealing with this all the time in recruitment. It can be done. People lie all the time or don't read the requirements. You need a way for the ones who really do know how to do the thing you need to demonstrate it to you. Have you ever been in a situation where you had to hire someone to help you with something? Would you really follow your own advice? Your advice does not make sense for carpenters, cooks, or drivers. Why should it make sense for programmers?

re_chief 7mo ago

> Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything. Wow, this is a great way of putting it. It's draining enough to go to third- and fourth-round interviews with other humans. Doing it with a series of AI chat bots would be devastating!

rimeice 7mo ago

Taking time to figure out if you’re the right fit for the company and the company is the right fit for you is a very good thing. For both parties! Rushed hiring processes increase the chances of you being fired for not being the right fit. Short hiring processes are a massive red flag for me.

array_key_first 7mo ago
True, but it becomes a problem when the entire thing is automated. Because then it's entirely one-way. You spend infinite cost and money, they spend nothing. So, you can't even figure out yourself if you're a good fit. It's entirely in their court.