Comment by MattRogish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattRogish | Hacker News Reader

There's no shared risk here, it's all on the candidate. Bad form.

Only something along the commitment of the 0.5-1hr "weed out" question can/should be done remotely.

If you're going to require people to do ~7 hrs of tests, that had better be at the office, pairing, with other folks (and at least give them a free breakfast/lunch/dinner!). 7 hrs while working a 40hr (or more!) week is a pretty hefty commitment, and I see no reason why that should be solely the burden of the candidate.

You should be able to trust one or two short, simple weed-out conversations (I tend to do one 30 minute "deal-breaker" discussion on non-tech stuff {make sure their and our deal-breakers are met}, then one about 1hr tech screen {fizzbuzz-sorts of things, but more diagnostic}).

After that, you should have a general sense of whether or not they are a) smart and b) can get stuff done. From there, you need to take a risk and bring them in. What is proposed is not fair to the candidate.

Yeah, 8 hours of essentially uninterrupted time is a lot to ask -- in fact it would basically be a deal-breaker for anyone with full-time commitments, or who otherwise values their time.

Also, (explicitly) timed coding tests imply that you don't really trust the candidate. Of course they could be lying when you casually ask how much time it took (or whether they got any help), but the few who go that route will probably quickly test out your other filters.

The trust signal, meanwhile, takes a lot of care and consideration to cultivate -- and shouldn't be discounted lightly.

You are right - 8 hours of uninterrupted time is excessive. And, our approach specifically does not ask for that.

If you see the constraints defined in the post - the goal is to have the interview be remote so that the candidate can do this wherever and whenever they want. And, the tests are specifically designed to be not longer than 4 hours long each. Perhaps what wasn't clear is that this is not in a single session.

Interviews can go for as long as a week - really depends on the candidate's schedule.

It wasn't clear. If this is separate tests, this makes the process a lot more doable, and pretty cool.

Our process 'weeds out' candidates as soon as we know that its not a good fit. This in reality saves the candidate ( who may be interviewing at other places as well as working like you mentioned ) as well as our time. The 7 hour number keeps coming up, and seems like a lot, but very few candidates actually spend that much time. And, most of those are actually hired.

We've tried conversations as well, but unfortunately, it is very difficult to objectively measure them into what will make the candidate successful at the company (interested to learn how you do it).

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