A hiring test I'd like to run

We’re a python and R shop. You can choose either test. As a non R user, I can get a decent score on the R test, because I can read docs. And that’s great.

We have also dabbled in game based assessments, and while I have qualms with it, the same kinds of skill sets seem to be the primary differentiator of success.

My 2c on two types of assessments people probably normally disregard

For a dba-adjacent job, I sat down with a dba and was shown how to connect to a sql server instance and change some particular setting. At the end of our hour of discussing other technical matters and my resume, he asked me to demonstrate recall of this simple command.

I looked at their Glassdoor where people wrote they were heavily biased to the algorithm type questions, for better or worse.

In reality I was given only a single coding interview my whole onsite, and it was to build a JavaScript SPA, including routing/linking, without the use of any framework, just vanilla JS.

I was allowed to Google whatever but 50 minutes is still a crazy time crunch to figure out a lot of the stuff that needed to be figured out.

It felt like a massively unfair way to evaluate me. I have honestly never felt more screwed over and time wasted by an interview than at Twilio and I would highly recommend avoiding interviewing there.

My overall point being, is there’s no silver bullet. It’s not necessarily about this magical process will work well and this one will not. It’s about the small details, especially things like making sure all of your interviewers actually read the candidates resume and that everyone knows what type of role they are interviewing for, and that the interview is designed to discover both the candidates strength and weakness. I’ve been on both sides of the process and I know too often shortcuts are taken and churning the pipeline forward takes priority over doing a diligent job and respecting the time of every candidate you engage with.

The very fact that the foundation of tech recruiting is inexperienced recruiters, with minimal tech knowledge, who are incentivized by sales type numbers, and churned through themselves at a comical rate, speaks to how the industry views recruiting. College athletes get recruited, top law school graduates get recruited, engineers aren’t recruited but relentlessly spammed in hopes of finding more bodies to feed into a process straight from a Kafka short story, the problem starts there and no a-ha process improvement will fix that.

You'd be better off arranging to play a strategy, preferrably collaborative, boardgame.

One day I'll use Pandemic as an interviewing tool. I wonder of it'd work as a pre-formal interview stage

> I'd tell them that at the start, obviously. This isn't The Secret Rules For Getting Hired.

> "I know you've never used Blender*," I'd say, "And this job doesn't require it. But we want to see how quickly and accurately you can learn to use something unfamiliar while under pressure."