I know some people here are very against take-home projects but believe me, lots of candidates love them because they remove the stress of having to code live in front of a stranger (me included!).
As a hiring manager, take-homes also let me take more chances on candidates since I didn’t have to convince one of my colleagues to give them a phone screen. The only issue with takehomes is that they’re pretty intensive logistically – there's a lot of emailing back and forth with the candidate to find an appropriate time, following up to ask for the source code, etc.
Please let me know if you have any questions – AMA here and you can also reach out by email at karim@fairlane.io!
- The candidates could pay/ask someone else to do the assessment for them/* and prepare a presentation.
- You are assuming candidates are willing to dedicate time to complete your take-home project. If your company is an unknown/smaller/boring company, good candidates won't bother to go through the process.
- Phone screens and or system design white-boarding, etc... only require 45mins - 1 hour from the interviewer to assess a candidate.
All interview techniques are flawed and there is no clear winner. FAANGs, for example, prefer the algo/design interviews and they do have hard data to work with, and clearly that have worked for them.
That said, I think you will succeed. Very simple, straightforward site. Seemingly neat integration with Greenhouse. And clear pricing structure.
It probably takes practice to be good at whiteboarding, but I'd rather practice being good at work than interviewing. So the irony is I actually avoid applying for FAANG, and instead opt for the smaller companies that do this instead.
I think it depends. When I was a hiring manager I offered candidates the choice between takehomes and a regular interview and about 50% took the takehome.
The key to a good takehome was to not be too long and respect the candidates' time – just as it'd be for an in-person interview. I'm not too worried about people cheating, usually they get caught later in the process (e.g during the design interview).
If you aren't a programmer, how do you know you are giving anything appropriate to the candidate, either technically or in a manner that respects our time?
If you were hiring a doctor, would you send them home with a patient? If you were hiring an airplane pilot, would you send them home with a little airplane for a few hours?
Of course not! I can't think of any single profession that has to have such an undue burden placed upon the candidate, so why are we put through this?
Many times, I find myself wishing we could just have a registration or licensing process like other professions. I thought my degree was supposed to be for that, but I guess not.
Re: the takehomes that never take two hours, I think (but I'm a little biased) that Fairlane solves that – given there's a hard limit on how long the repo is available, a company that makes a takehome that takes way too much time would notice because very few of their candidates would complete it.
Seems like there is a lot of promise here, as Fairlane could help companies like Plaid automate this takehome process in a scalable way for candidates.
That said, I only see this working for very early screens. Do you have plans to support later stages of the interview process?
The only other problem I see is to come up with enough take home problems
I am not sure I am understanding what your tool is doing EXACTLY but the idea is good to have a platform for that :)
