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Comment by sawmurai | Hacker News Reader

I think the only interviewing process that really works is to invite the candidate to work for one day, side by side with their future team.

This also gives the candidate a glimpse into the culture behind the HR marketing bs.

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Agree. We just recently went through a failed employee hire (even though we had a mini project for the candidate) and in the retrospective we came to the conclusion that our whole team was first hired as a contractor and then later converted to an employee. So we’re going to just keep doing that from now on.

How do you decide whom to hire for the contract role though? ;) A bad hire should indicate that your mini project missed testing something important for your team. In my own experience with an intern who didn't live up to my hopes, I realized I wasn't testing for the ability to read code not written by them, whose whole they cannot hold all in their heads (only a contextual part at a time), and make some changes to it. I do that now.

You do lose some candidates this way. If I'm already leaping from one stable job, I'm not going to roll the dice on a contract position. Sure it will probably work out, but everyone should already know not to trust promises made during the recruiting process.

I'm going to second that. I don't ever consider CTH, and there's a pretty strong body of programmers who feel the same way. There's too much risk in it.

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