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Comment by grayfox | Hacker News Reader

We've had no issues attracting excellent and talented people. Most of them would be considered "senior".

You might be interested to hear that Juniors are the group most likely to be deterred by the sample. The (great) majority of candidates have backgrounds and capabilities up to or exceeding what we're asking them to do. We actually get very few under-qualified applicants.

The process appeals to people who appreciate a fair and objective approach to hiring as it demonstrates how we value those traits. We "set the tone" early by giving everyone an open and honest shake at proving their abilities, without the awkwardness of dealing with a biased human filter.

I don't agree with the premise of your salary comparison.

The process is willing to pass on candidates and wish them well if they aren't willing to take a test -- again, if it would be so "beneath" their skill and experience, that's a spooky indicator of attitude.

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Or it may be an indicator of the attitude/shortsightedness of the hiring company.

From the candidate perspective, one way to assess the viability of the hiring strategy is imagine if most, or a significant number, of companies doing this. This eats significantly into each candidate's time, and edges the job seeking dynamic in favor of the companies, and against the candidate since the candidate is forced to value the cost of opportunity searching versus doing something else. This also dramatically would increase the stress of a job search - I experienced it first hand over the course of last year when a good portion of companies wanted projects done, all which would have totalled maybe 100 hours of extra work on top of everything else normally associated with interviewing.

This is not a sustainable balance for job seekers - ultimately this acts against most job seekers' self-interest. I'm fine with doing project-based tests ability/attitude-wise but this reasoning is why I pass up on them.

From first contact to hire, I think we're probably vastly more efficient with candidates' time than most companies. It's exceedingly rare to get as good of glimpse into what you'd be doing at a given job as you see from one of our sample projects. People who aren't great fits (either for desire or skill level reasons) can decide that very quickly. AND if they take it on, it's entirely on their own schedule, no coordination shenanigans.

From there, we do roughly what you'd do if you flew to a company for an interview (or drove, I guess). Rather than running someone through 3-5 different people, we organize it more as a full day project with the appropriate people around.

For most people, I suspect we spend more time pitching the value of the company than we do getting them to do work for us.

It's sustainable, provided companies act like us. :D We do a lot to explain what's going to happen, what we think makes people successful in our org, etc. My guess is most people who apply and make it through the process aren't out talking to 10-20 companies, they're specifically interested in companies like ours.

Based on feedback we've gotten from candidates, even people we passed on, the process is much more relaxing than what they're used to. We've had it called "more human", which is a little ridiculous, but based on how awful most hiring setups are it makes sense. Getting a job sucks and we really want our process to minimize the awfulness.

Anyone who could not only criticize but also resist straight up killing for the opportunity to work with the only and only grayfox is an anomaly. Either you are incredibly unaware, or on the next level of talented to not recognize this. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter, in which case, stop posting on HN, and start writing books. People need to hear your wisdom.

Fighting was the only thing... the only thing I was good at.

(That made my day, stranger, thank you).

That's the best part though. We don't have to agree! And that's totally okay.

Are there companies that ask for work samples (like yours)? Yes. Are there companies that rely more on resumes and interviews? Yes. Is the ratio going to change substantially? Possibly! It's an experiment, and like all experiments we're still waiting for the data to come back.

I think interviews and references are far more important than a skills test. You can train or educate almost anyone on most, if not all, skills. You can't train people to be decent coworkers emotionally.

> It's a an experiment, and like all experiments we're still waiting for the data to come back.

That, my friend, is the long and short of it.

Lookin' for a job? Got a work-sample you could try out... :)

This is a great suggestion - perhaps the guys from Compose can come back in 2 years and tell us how it went?

We've actually been doing this for two years already! It's much more sophisticated now, but even the naive version of what we're doing has been tremendously successful.

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