[PedroCandeias]

I'm helping hire developers here at HelloFresh and I thought of this a lot.

A surprising amount of people don't maintain a very impressive public profile (me included, tbh). These people need the opportunity to showcase their skills and the only way to do so is by spending some time coding a nice solution.

We try to minimize the candidate's overhead by providing general guidance in the challenges we issue (like "please demonstrate the SOLID principles").

Then we do a code review on the solution, in which we also spend some time. We point out issues, suggest possible improvements and give props on stuff we consider well done. At the end, if the candidate doesn't progress they at least learned something useful. We hope that this way our recruitment process might always be worth the time.

[RodericDay]

Why not just ask them?

You're on the phone with them, you can ask them if they'd prefer a little challenge to showcase their skills, or whether they'd like to provide a portfolio example instead.

Maybe a bright self-taught college student switching tracks into software would pick #1, a parent switching jobs would pick #2.

[PedroCandeias]

That's actually a great suggestion and I'm ashamed to admit it never occurred to me. I'll definitely share it internally. Thanks!

[numbsafari]

This sounds reasonable.

"We ask that you provide:

1) an implementation of this sample project (estimated 8 hours time).

2) a work sample that meets the following criteria (same criteria we are looking for in the sample project)"