alt Hacker NewsOur process is fairly simple:
1. 60 minutes interview with the CTO.
2. At home coding challenge. Candidates can pick one from 2 coding challenges. But we try to keep them engaging and fun, but still complex in details. Sometimes people don’t want to invest this time. That’s acceptable, but in this case you have to show os some of your work from the past, so we can discuss this.
3. Interview with 2 engineers from the team. We are doing coding challenges as a base for this interview. It’s just a way to get people talking with each other on technology and how they work.
4. Make an offer or say no to the candidate. Everyone involved in this process from our side has a veto right. So if one person says no - it’s a No.
5. Send contract to the candidate, if they accept the offer. This is the first time in the process where HR is involved. Everything else before was done by the Dev Team.
I think this is the most important part, show respect by taking care of the process by yourself and communicating with the candidate.
Replies
> We are doing coding challenges
I won't do a coding challenge unless you do mine too. Don't they always say interviewing should be mutual evaluation?
Here's the deal: You give me your standard coding challenge, then we reverse roles for an equivalent one I prepared. We do this for the full interview duration.
If you can't solve mine, that tells us something important about the technical bar at your company. After all, if coding puzzles are truly predictive of job performance and essential for determining candidate quality, then presumably everyone on your team, and especially those making hiring decisions should excel at them... ;-)
If your coding challenges are going to determine my professional future, and your company claims it only hires "the best," then you should have zero problem demonstrating that same level of excellence. I wouldn't want to work somewhere where the interviewers can't meet the standards they are imposing on candidates.
Either these challenges are meaningful indicators of ability (in which case you should welcome the chance to prove your team's competence), or they are arbitrary hoops and in that case, why are we doing this?
> veto right
I honestly disagree with the veto right because it makes it too easy to be abused. In my opinion, a supermajority (66% or even 75%) agreement should be sufficient. They said that Liberum Veto rotted the Polish-Lithuanian parliament.
> At home coding challenge
Surely a 15 minute phone screen at the beginning with an HR rep would help thin the field, no? Just something quick for them to show that they know how to act appropriately, dress professionally, show up on time, and speak the language. Plus it provides an opportunity for the HR rep to show a roadmap of the process and the candidate an opportunity to ask broad details in case they need to back out.
Caveat: I hate the concept of HR and the phone screen is an excuse to waste their time instead of mine. Also none of this applies if you have < 100 employees.
How do you select the people who get to talk to your CTO?
2. "...but in this case you have to show os some of your work from the past, so we can discuss this."
That is not always possible. There is always an NDA in contracts. Imagine me going around and revealing the code I have done for your company...
3.
Are you going to pay extra those two engineers of your company for doing something that is clearly outside what they were hired for at beginning or outside their competences?
4.
The same as 3. Are you going to pay those employees for doing manager work instead? Or the managers of your company are paid for doing nothing while showing doing something and soon ready, as in your message, to download their responsibilities to simple engineers (company's leaves )?
Edited.
When does the CTO has time to be the first unit in the pipeline? How much applicants do you have?
From our experience just posting a junior web developer job gets up to 1000 resumes into our inbox. And we just a small company without an established name.
The only possible first step for us is to automatically send everyone an at home coding challenge. This narrows down the list to only about 50 developers that would reply. Only 10 of them would send working code. And only at that point we can actually start to interview.