The business of takehome assessments

The next question would be "how do you narrow from {250} down to {25} by spending at most 3 minutes per resume?"

The answer there is often "select only the ones that show the most things on the resume without evaluation of their practical skills" ... and we get to the complaints then of "but people lie on their resumes all the time" and "but my skills at coding aren't things that I can reflect on the resume?"

And when you're spending 3-4 minutes per resume, you don't have time to open up a GitHub link and try to figure out if the person who this is wrote the code or if they just forked another repo ... and what contributions are theirs.

For evaluating a coder, the time imbalance is heavy on one side or the other.

Having two people do seven hours of interviews a day for two weeks is also in the "not feasible" category. As its the company that is setting up the criteria for the interview, they've got the first move and are setting up a process that they can fairly evaluate the candidates that apply and go forward with that step in a way that is most likely to eliminate the most risky candidates and find the candidates that have the skills but don't present well on a resume.

These are/were rampant in product design hiring. Especially "startups" or smaller companies. The direction is always the same "spend max a couple hours!" but the understanding is clearly you must spend significantly more. Some are cute with clearly non work related problem, like a previous company I worked for that did "design an app for a time machine" or similar. But many are very very obviously current problems the company is facing.

In my last job search (~3 years ago) I was presented with many requests to complete a design challenge. I rejected them outright and the responses I got (typically from a 3rd party "design recruiter") were quite astounding. Some acknowledged and moved on, but there were several who clearly expressed frustration, disdain, sometimes almost anger. One dropped me from another role I was working with them on for refusing.

Now it's a total red flag for me. But judging from Blind posts it's still a common practice.

I think the timer is probably something that doesn't get enough attention here. Lots of people say about how these select for people with lots of free time, and that's very true, but they also seem to be biased towards people that don't tend to freak out in stressful situations/do well with a clock rapidly ticking down behind them.

Which... doesn't necessarily correlate to someone being good at programming or web development or what not. Or whether they'll be good at the job in general, given that most engineering roles don't have someone screaming "get this done in under an hour or else!" with no time to think things through properly.

At the same time though, I can also see why they do that, since otherwise it comes down to "whoever's got the most free time and willingness to grind away at the problem", turning an hour long exercise into a 3 day one in the process.

So if you do a take home, I believe you MUST follow it up with a live review. It becomes painfully obvious who cheated based on their ability to reason about their decisions.

That’s offloading nearly a quarter of a person-year of work onto the 250 candidates—potentially much more, if it’s more than a truly-two-hour assignment. To save yourselves a far smaller amount of work. And that’s for just one stage of the interview process!

249 will receive no benefit for their work.

Nobody with options is gonna take that offer and you’ll be left with the desperate. It’s beyond rude, it’s a bad joke. If desperate’s what you want, then I guess go for it.