4 ms·

It's gets a bit complicated when your job candidates may find your test interesting enough that they post a complete walk-through of the solution online. The c

by jtheory 12y ago

It's gets a bit complicated when your job candidates may find your test interesting enough that they post a complete walk-through of the solution online. The candidate was kind enough to avoid posting the name of the company (to hopefully hide the walk-through from Google queries for "crack me hiring test company name", but an HN discussion might then arise around the walk-through, in which the company would be named, and well, there goes your test. It's hard to accurately run "take home" tests when hiring because of just this.

Fuxy 12y ago
If you're not changing your tests on every interview batch you're doing it wrong. You're asking a potential candidate to spend hours cracking your program but you can't be bothered to change it for each batch? I expect any company applying this interview technique to at least put some effort into it and even then it pays off since a batch could contain hundreds of candidates and you only have to build the program once.
- aaronharnly 12y ago
  What do you mean by "batch"? Most companies have rolling hiring.
  - warrenm 12y ago
    this is true - but you're [generally] going to have a batch of candidates for any given position
- chrisbennet 12y ago
  This ^ "You only get out of it, what you put into it." goes both ways - employers should expect to extend some effort if they expect their candidates to extend some effort. I strongly suspected that sometimes goals of the person responsible for hiring are not quite aligned with the company they work for. Example: Company's goal: Hire an exceptional candidate. Lazy or overworked hiring manager's goal: Reduce the size of the stack of 1000's of resume's I have to go through using any means possible that will make it appear like he/she actually did the work to find the candidate. "Lemme see, use keyword search to ditch the ones without 'Github' on their resume'. Now ditch the ones who don't have a college degree. Still some resume's left? OK, how about tossing the ones without a CS degree?" Run a filter with enough conditions and you can get that pile down to nothing pretty fast. If that is still not enough filtering, ask the candidates to do something very time consuming. This a great way to weed out people who are very busy or exceptional at what they do and don't need to jump through your hoops.
- lutorm 12y ago
  The problem is that this makes it difficult to compare evaluations. If you want to have as objective an evaluation of candidates as possible, you need to subject them to exactly the same process. I'm surprised they didn't make him sign an NDA for it...
Fuzzwah 12y ago
Pick a unique keyword for it all and SEO the hell out of a site selling the walk thru. Make it slightly wrong, or obviously fingerprinted.

by jtheory 12y ago

Fuxy 12y ago

If you're not changing your tests on every interview batch you're doing it wrong. You're asking a potential candidate to spend hours cracking your program but you can't be bothered to change it for each batch? I expect any company applying this interview technique to at least put some effort into it and even then it pays off since a batch could contain hundreds of candidates and you only have to build the program once.

aaronharnly 12y ago
What do you mean by "batch"? Most companies have rolling hiring.
- warrenm 12y ago
  this is true - but you're [generally] going to have a batch of candidates for any given position
chrisbennet 12y ago
This ^ "You only get out of it, what you put into it." goes both ways - employers should expect to extend some effort if they expect their candidates to extend some effort. I strongly suspected that sometimes goals of the person responsible for hiring are not quite aligned with the company they work for. Example: Company's goal: Hire an exceptional candidate. Lazy or overworked hiring manager's goal: Reduce the size of the stack of 1000's of resume's I have to go through using any means possible that will make it appear like he/she actually did the work to find the candidate. "Lemme see, use keyword search to ditch the ones without 'Github' on their resume'. Now ditch the ones who don't have a college degree. Still some resume's left? OK, how about tossing the ones without a CS degree?" Run a filter with enough conditions and you can get that pile down to nothing pretty fast. If that is still not enough filtering, ask the candidates to do something very time consuming. This a great way to weed out people who are very busy or exceptional at what they do and don't need to jump through your hoops.
lutorm 12y ago
The problem is that this makes it difficult to compare evaluations. If you want to have as objective an evaluation of candidates as possible, you need to subject them to exactly the same process. I'm surprised they didn't make him sign an NDA for it...

Fuzzwah 12y ago

Pick a unique keyword for it all and SEO the hell out of a site selling the walk thru. Make it slightly wrong, or obviously fingerprinted.