alt Hacker NewsThe 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).
Replies
For every "20 min max" take home assignment, there will be people who are willing to spend 4+ hours doing it to outshine candidates who have jobs, families and lives.
If you want to make it more of a fair consideration of time, consider moving your take home to interviews, that way there isn't a time cost asymmetry. You can enforce your "20 min max" claim this way, you can judge a candidate's performance, thought process and filter out anyone who is LLMing or spending inordinate amounts of time on them.
You will also make a better impression on candidates by investing your time in them in the same way they are with you. Maybe you're hiring kids out of college without experience, but you only have to do so many take home tests before you realize that they're a waste of time, and pass on potential employers who throw them at you, or you learn to just send them your hourly rate for the test.
20 minutes max seems fair to me. For context I was once given a 1 week assignment just to be discarded without any feedback. From then on if it takes more than a day I won't do it.
That seems reasonable. Some employers will hand out 3-6 hour assignments after a candidate’s resumes make it through an AI screening.
> 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.
In my experience this is the wrong game theory. Unemployed people can make job hunting their full time job, so a 20 minute take home doesn't select for "who delivers the highest quality solution in the least amount of time," it selects for "who is the richest applicant who can burn hours on a take home to deliver a higher quality result than people with less time they can afford to spend?"
Also, nobody should ever self-select themselves out of an interview process. Passing a resume review and getting a callback is about 10% likely: for every job hunt, in my experience , candidates get about 10 callbacks for every 100 resume sends. From there, it's about 20% chance to get to final stage, and from there, maybe 50% to get an offer (you're either their first choice or second; if second, your hiring hinges on whether the first choice accepts). Math is right there: once you pass a resume check, in terms of the volume of applications you've sent, it's optimal to spend far more effort into this gig than into firing off ten or twenty more resumes.
Therefore, even if the candidate doesn't think they're a good fit, they should do everything they can to stay in the game, including lying by omission.
After all they might be engaging in imposter syndrome, right? Why assume for the interviewer that your python skills aren't good enough - maybe the interviewer understands perfectly well that you've only used it for scripts and one off tools, but doesn't care because they personally believe your startup experience is more valuable to them and they believe you can up skill! Maybe the take home was designed poorly by someone who was tasked randomly by a lead to shit out a take home, and it's not an accurate indication of what the job would be like. Maybe they sent you the wrong take home? Maybe it's a good take home but you need money so fuck it, if you manage to sneak in despite not being a good fit, you can just bust ass to upskill and make up the difference before anyone notices. Or fuck it twice, it's a shit market and who knows how much longer you'll be able to sell your labor as an engineer, even if you can only fool them for two weeks, that's two weeks of income while you still keep up your job hunt.
Any take home test trivial enough to complete in under 20 minutes could be completed by an AI. The only signal you get from a take home test is whether or not they can submit answers. It doesn't let you know if the candidate is capable of passing the test unassisted.
Take home tests were never a worthwhile signal. Pre-AI, people would search for solutions or have another person complete it.