Salesforce wanted a THREE hour assignment before even discussing the role. What a joke!
If your first interaction with candidates, even from a huge, huge open pipeline of applications, is an automatic request for a time-intensive project or skills assessment, something is very broken with that hiring process.
You simply have to pay the (high & difficult) cost of evaluating & filtering applications and then having a detailed conversation with the small number of applicants you choose to move forward with. You need to understand their technical interests and match to the role, and let them ask lots of questions to even know if they are interested enough to invest time in the rest of the interviewing.
Personally one major change I’ve instituted over a few years in the ML & data science pipeline at my company is that we only do a technical conversational interview, no shared screen coding or take home project at all, it just doesn’t tell you anything, and counterintuitively you end up wasting more time and money administering it than if you just bring people onsite sooner and bite the bullet to evaluate them in a full interview day.
I remember doing a timed interview once when I was literally dealing with a harrowing elder care / home hospice ordeal with an aging parent in the next room from where I was coding the interview.
I remember thinking how myopic and un-human that company was (I had explained a little of the situation, they seemed super uncomfortable to hear any more about it, and basically said I could do their timed 2-hour thing like everyone else, take it or leave it).
No room to be a human with a sick parent I guess, or kids or a whole variety of other personal circumstances that make devoting hours of personal time to a coding task a sincerely unrealistic request.
If you’re trying to evaluate whether the candidate is telling the truth something is very wrong. There is no reasonable reaction from a company except to say, “you know what, people do have unusual and difficult personal circumstances, and it’s unreasonable to create interview filters you can only successfully devote time to passing when there are no other ‘real life’ issues going on, since this unfairly biases us against otherwise good candidates and makes us come off like we don’t offer pragmatic and realistic understanding of the human condition” and then just stop having take-home / timed coding assessments period.
It has nothing at all to do with that one candidate who alerted you to this. Who cares if they are lying? The point is it’s possible they are not, and overwhelmingly certain that the issue affects other applicants with these kinds of circumstances.
A company is moving on me with that increase and I'm starting to think screw it, I don't want to go through the irritating test they will give me. Of course that's because I have a job but still if one is comfortable, why go through the hassle.