alt Hacker NewsTo 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.
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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.
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).
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.
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.
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.