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Who pays for the tests? If candidates must pay then you will filter out any candidates who are unwilling or unable to invest the time and money required for com

by jiggy2011 12y ago

Who pays for the tests? If candidates must pay then you will filter out any candidates who are unwilling or unable to invest the time and money required for completing the tests. If you ask the employer to pay then they must have some way to filter candidates before they assign them the tests, otherwise they have to pay for 100s of tests. And this is even assuming that you can construct generic tests that correspond closely to the requirements of the employer.

lsiebert 12y ago
I'm not sure who pays for them. I think that paying for an assessment that actually tells you what you need to improve to get work might be useful for people. I know there are plenty of people who either are too confident, or too insecure about their abilities. And if it's a better assessment of ability then what HR currently uses, then isn't that worth some of what a company pays for HR? Probably it's something that would need to be worked out by the market, hence my idea of one company that comes up with the assessment and then licenses it, and multiple licensees that use the assessment, experimenting with how to pay for it. You could also assess existing employees, and figure out ways they could improve, or why one employee does better than others. In fact that might be a good way to begin research, albeit with some clear biases based on existing hiring practices. Also such assessments would arguably be less biased by things like unconscious sexism/racism, which could be useful for figuring out raises. I don't think that such tests would necessarily replace in house interviews. The goal isn't to create a perfect assessment, the goal would be to improve assessment. Let another company do the equivalent of a phone screening. As for generic tests... there are things that companies assess. knowledge of big O for example. Also such assessments could be used to assess more then individuals, things like the relative benefit of training programs. And eventually you could assess particular assessments based on performance, so you could improve the testing itself. It just seems silly to me to have every company do ad-hoc assessments on their own, when the whole industry could benefit by reducing inefficiencies.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  Thing is that there are already tests out there that test for programming ability but they tend to either be very academic and mathematically focused like project euler or on trivia related to specific languages or technology. When you have a working team, chances are that you already know most peoples strengths and weaknesses as it relates to the job function, so a test isn't so useful in finding areas for improvement. When hiring someone new you are either looking for people with the same skill set or a complimentary one. The problem remains that the best hires are probably in enough demand and know that they can get a job without having to take your test, especially if they need to pay to take it, so the people most likely to try and get a good score will be the worse hires who have a strong incentive to try and game the test which would be easy if the questions don't change often. Also, if the test were proven to be a reliable assessment of skills across the entire industry then people who scored highly on the test would quickly start asking for much higher salaries. But what employers are looking for is to get a lower salary on employees who have a good skill match for the employers specific problems even if the don't score well in some areas. So there is a reason for employers to develop their own tests.

lsiebert 12y ago

I'm not sure who pays for them. I think that paying for an assessment that actually tells you what you need to improve to get work might be useful for people. I know there are plenty of people who either are too confident, or too insecure about their abilities. And if it's a better assessment of ability then what HR currently uses, then isn't that worth some of what a company pays for HR? Probably it's something that would need to be worked out by the market, hence my idea of one company that comes up with the assessment and then licenses it, and multiple licensees that use the assessment, experimenting with how to pay for it. You could also assess existing employees, and figure out ways they could improve, or why one employee does better than others. In fact that might be a good way to begin research, albeit with some clear biases based on existing hiring practices. Also such assessments would arguably be less biased by things like unconscious sexism/racism, which could be useful for figuring out raises. I don't think that such tests would necessarily replace in house interviews. The goal isn't to create a perfect assessment, the goal would be to improve assessment. Let another company do the equivalent of a phone screening. As for generic tests... there are things that companies assess. knowledge of big O for example. Also such assessments could be used to assess more then individuals, things like the relative benefit of training programs. And eventually you could assess particular assessments based on performance, so you could improve the testing itself. It just seems silly to me to have every company do ad-hoc assessments on their own, when the whole industry could benefit by reducing inefficiencies.

jiggy2011 12y ago
Thing is that there are already tests out there that test for programming ability but they tend to either be very academic and mathematically focused like project euler or on trivia related to specific languages or technology. When you have a working team, chances are that you already know most peoples strengths and weaknesses as it relates to the job function, so a test isn't so useful in finding areas for improvement. When hiring someone new you are either looking for people with the same skill set or a complimentary one. The problem remains that the best hires are probably in enough demand and know that they can get a job without having to take your test, especially if they need to pay to take it, so the people most likely to try and get a good score will be the worse hires who have a strong incentive to try and game the test which would be easy if the questions don't change often. Also, if the test were proven to be a reliable assessment of skills across the entire industry then people who scored highly on the test would quickly start asking for much higher salaries. But what employers are looking for is to get a lower salary on employees who have a good skill match for the employers specific problems even if the don't score well in some areas. So there is a reason for employers to develop their own tests.