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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

> Instead of using CVs and interviews, potential employees undergo a basic competency assessment in which they are evaluated against 25 desirable attributes for software testers, such as the ability to learn new systems or take on feedback. Following these initial tests, potential staff undergo a week of working from home fully paid.

They still have an interview. It just isn’t like a traditional interview. You need to pass a test and then prove your ability for a week. It’s really a week-long interview.

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It's not an interview if they're paying you, it's a conditional hire for a week. Calling it an interview is like calling actually starting a job after a barrage of three interviews the fourth interview. At some point you're torturing the meaning of the word to pointlessness.

It's also a paid interview. It's more of a stretch to call a single week's employment 'conditional hire'.

If the tasks you're doing that week are purely for assessment purposes and the environment is completely different from the actual work place (as it takes place remotely), I'd say it's closer to a paid interview, which isn't new, than a classic trial period. It isn't that much longer than the process of some big companies, if you add all the interviews together.

I certainly understand people who think otherwise though.

Yes, they've fully diversified their workforce by selecting for people who do not currently have jobs.

Nobody with a job can -- or at least, will -- take a week off of work to do a test interview.

That was a bit snarky but I wonder if you do have somewhat of a point. I'd expect a lot more diversity among unemployed and underemployed people than among your typical engineering demographic.

Yep, that really isn't an issue here. The unemployment rate in this demographic is usually above 75%.

That's the problem they're trying to address here.

Also, it seems out of question for people who're employed. Not sure how to "WFH one week", paid or not, when you have another job.

I had a law school exam in one course that was take home.

Everyone thought it was a great idea until they realized it was 8-12 hours of working like crazy instead of the standard 2-3. It's still competitive, after all.

I could imagine a week long interview as pretty rough.

potential staff undergo a week of working from home fully paid.

How does this work for people already employed? Even if you took vacation many employers would take a dim view of you doing paid work for a competitor...

these kinds of shops offer non-competitive compensation, ensuring they are not interesting for those employed elsewhere.

these prolonged assessments seem worse than a regular take home assignment + presentation. its a waste of the applicants time really.

The bigger issue is you restrict your hiring pool to the set of people who aren't currently employed somewhere that won't allow that kind of moonlighting, etc.

It works, until your company gets big enough, and then it doesn't work anymore.

One of the main reasons that interviews stick around is because they allow for a much larger applicant pool.

A larger applicant pool, AND because they are a commitment device.

As a candidate, I know that the company is burning roughly the same amount of engineering hours interviewing me as I am burning interviewing them. So it's an honest signal that they are at least somewhat serious.

For comparison, one problem with take-home exercises as a first step, is that (especially good) candidates will wonder whether it's really worth their time when their work might just go into the round file straight away.

Sounds awful. Wouldn't any person be next to useless in their first weeks at any new job? Unless you give them some small well-defined task that doesn't require much domain knowledge, I can't see how one could showcase their abilities in this way.

I wonder how the assessment works? Is it a written test? Also a week long interview will not work for people already employed. And many people interview at multiple places in parallel and negotiate the best offer. This approach might be better for for some people so might be offered as an option.

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