How would you give an interview that is challenging, fair, and quick?
I don't like complaining without a suggestion, so... consider letting a candidate code on their own, and then ask them to walk you through what they did. You won't be disturbing the process by staring at them, and you'll get to see a bit about how they work independently & articulate what they've done. Unless you're a pairing shop, that's really what you're looking for anyway, yes?
The right hiring process for one position may be completely wrong for another. And that’s OK.
I don't think that necessarily applies to real-time pairing exercises though. The interviewer has significant latitude to interactively question and prompt to get at the skills and values a candidate possesses.
I showed him, we talked about it, he asked me to add a simple feature, I think I taught him something about the tech stack that he didn't know. It worked well for both of us.
What’s so compelling about your company that people are willing to put in 5x the time commitment to apply as for most other companies? I can literally do 4 rounds of “phone screen -> on-site” with other companies in that time. If I’m working, why would I want to blow 1/3 of my yearly vacation to go through one interview process?
Having had interviews at companies where it was NOT as advertised during the interview phase, I'd value that.
If I was already interviewing for another job outside of my existing one, I'd gladly take a week off to do it.
But if they were trying to get me to leave a job I already liked, I wouldn't commit that much time for it.
Simplisticly, it might boil down to something like a preference for quality* interviewing over quantity.
* not saying our process is definitively better than others, just that some candidates want fewer interviews that they feel are a better potential fit for them.
Paying for the interview is compelling. Almost nobody does that, so it's a differentiator. My first assumption on hearing that is "it sounds like they respect their engineers as professionals more than most companies do".
They don't hire people who have jobs because no one would/could do this.
Most devs with existing jobs have good jobs with decent vacation/PTO policies. So they have days to invest if they want to.
Don't be so quick to assume the worst. :)
But you do use the work to build your backend/office applications. In the end you are paying someone $250 for a 15 hour project + two days of in person development time.
Great idea. Many with follow.
"The costs of travel and lodging are compensated at this stage, but we are not paying them hourly. The work they do for us is not customer based work and does not generate revenue for us."