Comment by aiauthoritydev
10 months ago
Having interviewed hundreds of consultants and been interviewed by many and having seen the cheating etc. from all sides I have first hand opinion on this.
Sadly how people recruit is completely broken for most companies that are not FAANG etc. (It is broken for FAANG as well but in a different way).
As I often say "you need to win, not win an argument". Similarly you want candidates that can be good productive members of your team at the salary you are paying and not the candidates who can nail your interview process.
The problem with take home tests is not the cheating. But rather failure of the recruiter to actually evaluate the assignment. Do you care about the end result or do you care about the art of craft ? Do you care about readability of the code or performance of the app ? Is the assignment similar to the work candidate will end up doing at workplace ?
My suggestion generally has been:
1. Look at candidate's past work. Has candidate worked with reputed companies ? 2. Talk with candidate with general technology topics around their work. Something like "what do you like about react?" 3. Give candidate a very simple codesignal test. Nothing to fancy. Say if you want react engineers just test their ability to implement simple components.
This vastly kills a lot of inferior talent in my opinion.
4. Give a very simple problem without any "trick" or "iq test" and ask the candidate to code it in front of you. Also let the candidate use internet, documentation and AI tools.
In this day and age asking candidates NOt to use AI tools like asking a candidate to write code without using keyboard. You want people who can use things like Github copilot.
I don't know about your first point. We recently hired two persons who came from VeryBigBusiness Inc. and VeryImportantCorp Inc., so I assumed that they were at least slightly above the average. Soon it became evident that the only field were they both excel was the art of arranging unending meetings, being very vocal in those meetings, looking always too stressed and too busy, getting themselves in key projects while avoiding the day to day work, and never getting any real work done.
One of them was causing such friction with endless meetings and mail chains, that a project she coordinated that was a quagmire for six months was finished in the two weeks after she left.