I have $100 here that says most won't (if any).
* If we can't hire people due to a broken system, how do we expect to succeed?
I don't get your beef.
The phone interviews are there to screen the 80% of the applicants who don't merit the time of my team to interview them. The puzzles are there to watch people think on their feet. The detailed questions are to see if you're looking at someone superficial or someone with deep knowledge of the subject matter. The programming challenges are to see if the applicant wants the job badly enough to spend a couple of hours working on a programming problem that can then be used as a showcase for how they write some software.
Earlier in my career, I didn't have all those interview techniques in place. When I started, hiring people was a complete crap shoot and I ended up with some total lemons. Like the warning labels on products you buy, each interview technique I added to the process was the result of a lame hire that in hindsight, I could have avoided had I used that technique.
The last job I had to interview for used all the techniques above. I found the interview process to be thorough and challenging. I appreciated the rigor of the interview process since it meant that the people hiring really gave a shit about the quality of the people joining their small team. I got the job. In point of fact, if they hadn't had a thorough interview process, I probably would have passed on the job offer since that would have been an indication to me that they were naive and didn't have their crap together.
Do you want to send me your $100 via Paypal?
Sadly, I don't use Paypal. You can make a donation to your local hackerspace with the $100 that you will soon lose.
Good luck.
PS. Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?
Almost without exception, people who don't get hired never hear back from a company as to why. Yes, I know all about "everyone's afraid to get sued for saying something wrong". So... develop a neutral feedback form to candidates as to why they were passed over, skills the interviewer(s) thought were lacking, etc. This will mean that people can get better, perhaps get another job (yes, maybe at a competitor, but also maybe somewhere else entirely), and continue to earn income, pay taxes, and contribute to society in a productive way. Some people can contribute without a job, sure, but right now most people need jobs.
Telling someone "we're sorry - we had 8 candidates apply for this position, and we ended up taking on someone with more experience in X, Y and Z compared to your experience level. We wish you the best of luck in your job search". This would be courteous, professional and helpful all at the same time. Between my own experience and that of several colleagues, fewer than 5% of employers ever provide something even remotely useful in terms of feedback.
How do we expect the job seeking population to get better without providing feedback mechanisms for them to learn from?
And what about the cases where your reasons are not "more experience in X, Y, Z"? Cultural fit is a biggie - one might turn down a candidate who is more qualified because his banking attitudes would go over badly at a startup, for example.
Companies don't seem to realize that treating applicants bad is just as detrimental in many cases as poor customer service. I've had bad experiences with job application processes, and I've told many people chapter and verse about the companies involved. If they can't even treat people well who want to work there, how will they treat customers after the money is received?
If unskilled candidate X gets "other candidates had more specific skillz" while uncultured candidate Y gets "sorry, you suck for unspecified reasons", it sounds like a lawsuit risk.
Specifically asked? I've received lots of feedback from people who made it through the process. They've added to my bag of interview techniques here and there. In general, they appreciated a hiring manager who spent a lot of time and effort fielding good people. Those kinds of comments tend to be a bit self-selecting, though.
I've had a couple of candidates who didn't make it get frustrated with the process. One in particular lost his cool just trying to pseudocode a routine to determine prime factors of the input or something like that. If you lose your composure doing something like that, I don't want you in the trenches with me late at night when we have a demo to show to customers the next day and something isn't working.
When people have asked me for feedback on why they weren't made an offer, I've always tried to be as candid as possible; especially when it seemed that they were sincerely trying to improve. Screw HR and their obsessive need to CYA.
Genuinely curious: why do you consider spontaneity an essential trait in a programmer?
The irony is that software engineers are so much rarer than everyone else in the market we can easily be hand screened thus bypassing the very software we created. Finding software engineers is really hard because there are so few so either you don't get a lot of people applying, which makes it easy to screen by hand, or you set the bar very low to get people in the door. Then you go through 6 months to find the right person.
If you aren't a software person its much much harder to find a job because there are so many other people looking for jobs. You have to compete much harder, downward wage pressure, etc. Hence the volume increasingly demands automated solutions that make it even harder to get past the screeners.
I happen to agree with this article that we do a poor job of specifying the skills that are absolutely mandatory vs. what's nice to have. If we back off on rigid skill set we can find great people than can grow into a job.
I know it so well that the last person I recommended (for the recruitment bounty) breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions. I could get through the whole process easily. I doubt I'm the only person.
What kind of people set questions in interviews without knowing what answer they're hoping for? How do they know if the candidate is any good if they don't know the answer themselves? That sounds.... well, it sounds insane.
I probably botched an interview where they expected me to come up with an RB tree fast enough (it was a company that has posted on HN).
Tipping people off to questions is cheating the test, so you have some people trying to temporarily bulk memorize algorithms that they'll forget in another month before an interview. Does anyone else not find this stupid?
The kind of people who want to "see how you think."
Also, once you've done a little training the sunk costs fallacy can kick in, even if you wouldn't hire them in hindsight.
But when these conversations turn into arguments it all comes down to some applicants being more "qualified."
There are lots of reasons people get hired to do jobs they've never done before and lot of those reasons are subjective.
Maybe the CEO got a not so gentle nudge from the investors to hurry up and hire somebody and you were the one they were interviewing next. Stuff like that happens a lot. The process is more about outside factors than the actual interviewing process itself.
I'll take your bet, if you are still inclined to give away money.