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Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

I'd love if more companies adopted auditioning over the traditional interview process.

It was counter intuitive to me at first but it's potentially a cheaper way to hire. There's less downtime for the hiring team - everyone can more or less continue what they're working on.

It's a better quality of interview too - candidates have a more realistic platform to show their worth.

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For candidates who already have jobs, how would "auditioning" work? Is it assumed that they'd take time off from their current job to do it?

An audition can be a small paid contract that you can work on in your otherwise free time hours, here and there, on your own premises, then just do whatever interaction or delivery is necessary to show results and demonstrate value. And you get paid for it. It doesn't have to be a MF/office-day/on-site thing. The goal is just to test out two-way fit under as realistic of circumstances as possible, testing for the things you care about most, and, really, have it be reciprocal: the applicant/candidate gets paid. The details are choosable by both parties and should be mutually agreeable. Sprinkle to taste. And you can iterate.

"touchable" portfolios, a public interaction trail, and realistic paid short audition contracts are a killer combo and I hope the future for software development hiring. I'm doing my part to promote it.

For me the issue is coming up with the tasks to farm out. Do most companies have lots of discrete tasks that don't require domain knowledge?

Everyone says it takes 3 months to a year before a developer is really up to speed and hits their peak contribution levels. How does that square with this new philosophy of interviewing-by-contracting?

Auditioning sounds great, atleast from a college graduate's perspective. Make the new graduates work on problems. A percentage of new generation of coders end up learning that whiteboard tests work perfectly fine and are the de facto standard.

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