That only makes sense if you're talking about people who are unemployed. As someone who is already employed full-time, I simply don't have the time to solve your problems for free just to see if you'd like to invite me over for an interview.
I avoid these problems like the plague and very much prefer to whiteboard. If you pay me consultant rates, I can more easily justify the effort.
Even when I was between jobs a couple months ago I neglected to complete a take-home interview exercise, because the opportunity cost still exists. The advantage to interviewing in person is that the conversation goes both ways. I was interviewing daily, so I still valued my spare time for personal activities.
Edit: I most likely would have completed it if I were offered some type of compensation, even below market. They claimed it was an exercise and they wouldn't use it, but this was a startup with about 10 employees, and the deliverable was definitely something they could have used. That alone rubbed me the wrong way.
Who would have thought? Maybe - just maybe - not everyone has the same strengths and weaknesses. The real answer here is obvious: present the interviewee with options. Forcing all potential hires to whiteboard is a terrible idea. Forcing all potential hires to do a take-home project is a terrible idea. It's extremely short-sighted and a little pompous to assume that any single interview format one chooses is going to magically sort everyone into neat little buckets of "good" and "bad".
If you force the whiteboarding approach, you are only going to wind up hiring social butterflies who have absolutely no nerves standing up in front of complete strangers and having all the answers on the spot. If you force the take-home project approach, you're turning off a lot of people who can nail a first impression presenting themselves and their skillset in person.
People are different. Applying the same interview type to everyone is going to target a specific set of strengths, and a specific set of weaknesses. And frankly, no business should be composed entirely of one type of person. Some diversity does wonders when assessing the overall strength of a team.
> "If you force the take-home project approach, you're turning off a lot of people who can nail a first impression presenting themselves and their skillset in person."
Whiteboarding is a poor reflection of what people do day-to-day, and can be misleading if a candidate practices interview technique over coding experience. In other words, just because someone can regurgitate an algorithm on command, doesn't mean they'll be a good developer.
If all you want to optimise for is finding people who make a good first impression, by all means carry on with whiteboarding. However, if you want to find good developers then there is a one-size-fits-all solution, and that's to see how they develop code in the real world, which is exactly what the 'weekend project + appraisal' approach is a great fit for.
> The real answer here is obvious: present the interviewee with options.
If you're a company that does any kind of business with the federal government, that's simply not an option. You have to be super-consistent in terms of your interviewing and
recruiting process across all candidates for a job req and can't do things for some candidates without doing it for all of them.
> I simply don't have the time to solve your problems for free just to see if you'd like to invite me over for an interview.
I think that would be misusing this approach.
We build recruitment software.
The recruitment process is a funnel. At each stage, the employer tries to weed out the bad candidates. Simple maths says they try and use cheaper tests early on in the process when there are more candidates.
For example, first stage is often eyeballing the resume and a quick search on GitHub/SO. 5 minutes, costs say $10, weeds out say 65% of candidates.
At the next stage, we use a more expensive test, since we have fewer candidates to filter.
This particular test sounds like it would sit after an initial phone screen and before a team interview in terms of cost.
Personally I would only use it after a first interview, or tell the candidate that you will decide immediately after completion of the first interview whether it was successful, and if so send them away to do this project afterwards,i.e. reduce double handling
I hear this argument quite often but my reaction tends to be...
...as someone that's fully employed I'm probably only looking at jobs I'm really interested in. I don't mind doing some free work for stuff I'm interested in. I also enjoy doing small unpaid side projects or programming puzzles in my free time...basically the same concept.
That being said, my guess is (ignoring legal implications) paying 200$ or whatever for it is actually more beneficial to the company than expecting you to do it for free so it seems like a nobrainer (once again assuming you can handle legal). Reciprocity and all.
Do you also fundamentally oppose to contributing to FLOSS software because that's most certainly being used by for-profit companies. Or is that ok because others that don't profit from it can also use said software?
I do something that I enjoy and throw it away afterwards or whatever I tend to do with little programming puzzles and project Euler stuff or I do the same thing and a company profits off it. The profiting doesn't really hurt me so I don't mind it. I'd also argue that if the intention of a company is to profit off my interview code I'm hopefully filtering them out (as they tend to be pretty boring)...having people write code for you by pretending to offer a job is also all kinds of horrible strategically so I don't see the potential for a mass exploit.
I can understand your point of view but I hear the dreaded "but my time is too valuable" more often than "it's unfair that they profit of it". My argument was mostly that...if you want the job, your time probably isn't too valuable to try to get it :)
> As someone who is already employed full-time, I simply don't have the time to solve your problems for free just to see if you'd like to invite me over for an interview.
That means you don't care enough about changing jobs. There are people who will happily do that "interview" for free even when being employed full-time. The only relevant question for the company is whether there are enough qualified candidates willing to do the test for free.
I re-read this later and wondering if that's actually true. Our industry is very "you don't have anything to do this weekend, right? right!" Anyways, it's true for me.
That couldn't be more wrong if you tried. Not to mention, you're assuming that people need the job. It's the other way around. The company needs the engineers. Much more than the engineers need the jobs.
I avoid these problems like the plague and very much prefer to whiteboard. If you pay me consultant rates, I can more easily justify the effort.