I've seen two kinds of motivations: that for career climbing, and that of an engineer who enjoys making things. I personally prefer my engineers to have the sec

I've seen two kinds of motivations: that for career climbing, and that of an engineer who enjoys making things. I personally prefer my engineers to have the second. I tried hiring the normal way (CV, white board) and had one candidate worth speaking to in over 200 applicants. We decided to try something else. We stopped reading any cover letter or CV and wrote that in the job ad. We asked candidates to build a simplified version of what the job was about, taking about 4 hours, then to send us the code which we'd discuss with them over the phone at their convenience. Anybody whose code passed would be hired, and if people couldn't be bothered because they were already famous they could send us their libraries. Nobody took the Starcraft best of 7 option :( Why we did this: - having to write code eliminates those who can't, or who can't be bothered; not having complex unrelated hoops to jump through eliminated those who are good at career climbing; - we replaced the hours candidates would normally spend dealing with HR or travelling to a site for something ("cultural fit") that overselects the polished anyway, with something people we want would enjoy doing (solving a problem, writing code); - no pressure, access to your "external brain" (Google, your own libraries) unlike with a white board; allows for the anxious to pass, and those who outsource a lot of their knowledge to the machine (like me); - you can tell a lot about how people will approach their job from the way they approach the small version of it; documentation, structure, abstraction levels, choice of libraries, and if you're wrong about the candidate's reasons you can always clear it up in the chat; - it's fair because everybody has to tackle the same problem; - no discrimination since it's all ability based: I took to Skype-text-chatting with candidates instead of voice calls mostly because I don't like talking on the phone. It was only when she sent us her passport scan for the contract that we realised one of our candidates was female. Another team member didn't have a CV; it's because he was just finishing high school, as we discovered when we talked to him, but his code was good enough, so he got the offer and skipped university. I've never had to put out another job ad (not for myself anyway) because I have so many qualified candidates left over from that round, and from the team network. Surprisingly, we didn't get spammed; the requirement to post code seems to have been mostly understood and we only had a half dozen "dear Sir/Madam"s. So I disagree with you, but YMMV. We were hiring for a small, distributed team solving relatively well known problems. Requirements are probably different at Google or Facebook.