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Comment by vorador | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN – I’m Karim, the creator of Fairlane. I built this because as a hiring manager I found out the hard way that take-home projects were way better than any other way to screen candidates.

I know some people here are very against take-home projects but believe me, lots of candidates love them because they remove the stress of having to code live in front of a stranger (me included!).

As a hiring manager, take-homes also let me take more chances on candidates since I didn’t have to convince one of my colleagues to give them a phone screen. The only issue with takehomes is that they’re pretty intensive logistically – there's a lot of emailing back and forth with the candidate to find an appropriate time, following up to ask for the source code, etc.

Please let me know if you have any questions – AMA here and you can also reach out by email at karim@fairlane.io!

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Take-home projects are flawed as well.

- The candidates could pay/ask someone else to do the assessment for them/* and prepare a presentation.

- You are assuming candidates are willing to dedicate time to complete your take-home project. If your company is an unknown/smaller/boring company, good candidates won't bother to go through the process.

- Phone screens and or system design white-boarding, etc... only require 45mins - 1 hour from the interviewer to assess a candidate.

All interview techniques are flawed and there is no clear winner. FAANGs, for example, prefer the algo/design interviews and they do have hard data to work with, and clearly that have worked for them.

That said, I think you will succeed. Very simple, straightforward site. Seemingly neat integration with Greenhouse. And clear pricing structure.

Thank you for the kind words!

I think it depends. When I was a hiring manager I offered candidates the choice between takehomes and a regular interview and about 50% took the takehome.

The key to a good takehome was to not be too long and respect the candidates' time – just as it'd be for an in-person interview. I'm not too worried about people cheating, usually they get caught later in the process (e.g during the design interview).

Oh I see, so the take-home project would be the just the first step, not the only? That makes sense. Congrats on the launch, and wish you the best.

Personally, I hate algo interviews and whiteboards and have a 100% fail rate on them. I can do tough Codility challenges, but in front of a person, I fall apart doing even basic questions, and freeze on something like a string to integer conversion. For the tests I've done, normally I ask if I can finish them offline, and I usually get them done pretty well.

It probably takes practice to be good at whiteboarding, but I'd rather practice being good at work than interviewing. So the irony is I actually avoid applying for FAANG, and instead opt for the smaller companies that do this instead.

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