If the candidates look like garbage, why are you screening them?
You can't always tell. You begin part of the process, then the company says how great their Agile teams are, or how "collaborative" their open-plan surveillance workspace is, or they invite you to do a HackerRank test, and only now do you know the company is shit and you pass.
It's the same problem you face with the 60-80% unqualified applicants. I get messages from head hunters, direct recruiter emails on Stack Overflow, traditional recruiting firm phone calls, as well as occasional job listings that I locate through a job search.
80% of these jobs are shitty and need to be weeded out, even when they have plausible-seeming job descriptions and acceptable GlassDoor reviews.
I'm screening them to eliminate the garbage? I'm not sure I understand your point here. We don't choose the applicants we want to apply, the applicants choose which companies to apply for.
The problems with companies that you mention above have nothing to do with the coding test, it's the company itself. Those are perfectly valid reasons not to continue the application process. But eliminating a company because they apply a coding test as a basic level of applicant screening still strikes me as an arbitrary move that does nothing but rule out perfectly valid job opportunities.
Most people don't get to choose who to interview. Your manager or your recruiter does not have enough data to eliminate the 60% unfit. But the first 40% are already eliminated because those candidates did not pass even the first phone interview with a recruiter (think Google hiring process).
My point is that candidates face that exact same problem when trying to weed out bad employers. That's why good developers reject the employers who try to use commodity tests like HackerRank. We do it for the same reason that the employer wants to use the commodity tests to weed out bad candidates. But somehow the employers don't understand they are just signalling how bad they are (apart from a very rare few companies).
HackerRank-like lazy, commodity evaluation is not remotely close to "put[ting] some effort in to find the right job." It's very critical that we don't allow people to make the false comparison between actual interview effort and daft HackerRank time-wasting.
In fact, doing the emotionally difficult task of rejecting an employer who tries the HackerRank commodity nonsense represents putting in more legitimate effort to find the right job and to judiciously choose to complete code evaluations for companies that aren't being lazy and wasting your time.
You can't always tell. You begin part of the process, then the company says how great their Agile teams are, or how "collaborative" their open-plan surveillance workspace is, or they invite you to do a HackerRank test, and only now do you know the company is shit and you pass.
It's the same problem you face with the 60-80% unqualified applicants. I get messages from head hunters, direct recruiter emails on Stack Overflow, traditional recruiting firm phone calls, as well as occasional job listings that I locate through a job search.
80% of these jobs are shitty and need to be weeded out, even when they have plausible-seeming job descriptions and acceptable GlassDoor reviews.