> with take-home there's also the fact that the great candidates will probably have an offer before they even get to start working on your take-home
Are you seeing excessively demanding take-home projects? I've only ever seen take-home challenges in the 1-4 hour range.
On the hiring side, I gave candidates a choice between our take-home problem or an on-site interview. Everyone gladly chose the take-home problem.
I don't understand why so many people are loathe to spend a few hours in the comfort of their home working on a take-home challenge in their preferred dev environment, when the alternative is to take time off work to handle a mid-day interview with a live person.
As much as HN hates take-home problems, I've received near universal approval from candidates on the hiring the side relative to having people do live, in-person tech interviews.
Problem with take home test is that it’s asymmetric time commitment - candidate spends time but company does not have to. You can send take home test to 100 people competing for 1 open position because take home takes candidate 4 hours to do but only 10 minutes to check by company engineer (or even recruiter or automated tool).
Easy to waste candidate time.
With in person interview time commitment is the same for both company and engineer so no sane company will waste candidates time (at least on purpose). Feels much more fair.
> I've only ever seen take-home challenges in the 1-4 hour range.
For college hiring, that's on top of a busy schedule (and everyone interviews roughly at the same time). So the take-homes add up.
And it's a long time commitment from the candidate but a potentially very short one from the employer (run some automatic grading/testing then ghost the candidate). Going to an on-site and meeting engineers shows more commitment on the employer's side (talking to the candidate is worth 2 hours of an engineer's time).
But if you have a good completion rate for your take-home, that's great.
Are you seeing excessively demanding take-home projects? I've only ever seen take-home challenges in the 1-4 hour range.
On the hiring side, I gave candidates a choice between our take-home problem or an on-site interview. Everyone gladly chose the take-home problem.
I don't understand why so many people are loathe to spend a few hours in the comfort of their home working on a take-home challenge in their preferred dev environment, when the alternative is to take time off work to handle a mid-day interview with a live person.
As much as HN hates take-home problems, I've received near universal approval from candidates on the hiring the side relative to having people do live, in-person tech interviews.