We can't hire everybody. I can't hire 20 people (then fire 19 of them) for the 1 position in the 8 Person team I want to fill. That can't work.
Just hiring someone and then firing them 2 weeks later is expensive as fuck. We can't just do that until we find someone actually competent.
Your "easy solution" is only easy if you don't think about it at all.
I'm not saying you don't do ANYTHING to hire someone. Obviously there needs to be some judgement of skill. But take home projects where you're judged essentially against how much time you put into them (I've personally had projects where they asked me to build an entire web app, it's insane) because ... it's a race to the top in a way here, if you spend more time it's going to look good, because the best projects are from people that spend a lot of time on them...
It's just ridiculous. You end up doing 8-16 or more hours of work for a job you likely won't get (it's free for you to ask me to do this test, so you ask everyone to do it).
It's not expensive to hire and fire someone. Not that expensive. It's probably worth 20hrs of 100 candidate's time, that's for sure. If you don't think so, I have a bad opinion of you.
I'd like to ask you, how many candidates a year do you have turning in take home projects?
We align the Take home assignment very close with what the position actually entails. If you struggle with this assignment you would not succeed with actual tasks we do daily.
> Obviously there needs to be some judgement of skill. But take home projects where you're judged essentially against how much time you put into them
As I said elsewhere as well: People are free to choose to do a Technical Interview instead. If you fear that you would need 2 whole days you could take the 1 hour interview instead.
> if you spend more time it's going to look good, because the best projects are from people that spend a lot of time on them...
That is not my experience. There are people that just can't make it look good.
> It's not expensive to hire and fire someone. Not that expensive.
It absolutely is. Maybe not where you are, but where we are it is expensive. For one there is a big amount of paperwork involved, contracts, NDA's and background checks. We can't do this unless we know we actually really want to hire you.
I also can't expect a new employee to be productive right away. There is going to be a onboarding period of at least 3 months during which the employee probably needs a little bit more mentoring of a (more) senior engineer. If we would just hire 20 people for every position that we need to fill we would not do anything else then just onboard new people. So, YES, it is significantly more then 20h of 100 candidates time. Not to mention that the take home we give out takes maybe at a maximum 4h (if the candidate is fairly junior and has to look up stuff constantly, many people just do it in 1h).
Also: I think it would be HIGHLY unfair for the people to just hire 20 candidates if you only plan to keep 1. They probably quit their jobs or said no to other opportunities. We only hire people we see a long term future at the company.
> I'd like to ask you, how many candidates a year do you have turning in take home projects?
It is fairly late in our hiring process and it takes a significant amount of time from at least 2 senior engineers each time to review. I don't have the exact numbers how many times per Year, but we try to keep it very low and only if there is an actual interest on our side.
