In my company (totally remote) we decided to automate hiring (also remote) as most as possible and we are happy with the results. We also value the candidate's time very much so we made the hiring process very straightforward. It works like this:
- First the candidates must do some online tests, which are mostly multiple choice questions. The subjects are logic, english and a specific test for the coding language. All of these tests were hand made to us and customized to our needs. The candidates spend about 2 hours in total doing theses tests, and they know immediately their score in the parts of the tests that can be accessed automatically (which are the most part)
- The candidates approved in the theoretical tests - about 10% of the candidates that applied for the job - do a practical coding challenge that was also made from scratch by us. We have looked at the available solutions in the market and thought they are too focused on textbook algorithms that are rarely used in the job market. So we made our own tests that contemplate practical problems a programmer has to solve daily in our company. The questions are NOT too complex. The objective of this step is to weed out the candidates that can't code in the language, not to get the best. We design this challenge to take about 2 hours. The implementation was a lot of fun: we use the Docker API to run the candidate's code against the automated tests we made and the score is calculated as the number of tests that passed. Using Docker means we can work with any language that runs on Linux. So far we have made tests in Javascript, Typescript, Ruby, Postgres and Elm.
- The candidates that are approved in the previous step - about 2-4% of the candidates that applied for the job - are called for an interview. Now is the time when we take a look at the candidate's resume and look at the human side of things. Given that we have very few candidates to look at and we know they all meet some minimum skills we are very confident when conducting the interviews. By now we usually have a very clear signal to tell who the best candidate is even before we conduct the interviews. So in practice the interviews are NOT used to select the best candidate. They are there just to see if a red flag doesn't show up.
We are very proud of our coding challenges app. If someone wants to collaborate on it just drop me a message. It's a Rails app on GitHub, but it probably not good enough for an open source project yet - one needs to know a lot about Docker and Rails to make it work.