Comment by vundercind
10 months ago
That’s offloading nearly a quarter of a person-year of work onto the 250 candidates—potentially much more, if it’s more than a truly-two-hour assignment. To save yourselves a far smaller amount of work. And that’s for just one stage of the interview process!
249 will receive no benefit for their work.
Nobody with options is gonna take that offer and you’ll be left with the desperate. It’s beyond rude, it’s a bad joke. If desperate’s what you want, then I guess go for it.
I am certainly not saying that it is time fair or that it doesn't result in a lot of excess work being done.
Take home assignments are there to minimize the amount of time spent per candidate with the most limited resource in the interview process - the people on a small team doing the interviews.
That is the problem that it is trying to solve.
Trying to minimize for the candidate time spent, increases the amount of the limited resource (the interviewers' time) and may mean that the interview process will be longer than is acceptable for candidates (are you willing to wait 4 weeks between the last interview and offer?) and removes the interviewers from revenue generating tasks.
There is no good solution to this. Often take home assignments are the least bad solution.