[impish19]

Whenever someone decides to hire someone, all of their criteria are heavily biased towards what kind of skills the candidates posses.

I wonder if someone can come up with a reasonably accurate way to determine how well or easily can a candidate acquire particular skills.

I realize this line of thought might not be popular for most startups who would want someone to get going as soon as they start. But if you're having a tough time hiring a Machine Learning engineer and you get applications from a bunch of smart folks who want to gain experience in Machine Learning, would it be a good idea to give them a shot?

The traditional 'puzzle solving' in interviews was probably geared in this direction, but I'm wondering if there are better ways to gauge this.

[Harj]

This is something we're able to do too by encouraging people to reapply and tracking how much they've improved between technical interviews. It makes sense for companies to do this too but they don't, mostly because it's never any single person's area of focus.

[impish19]

Can you share more information about your findings here?

More specifically, has any company ever been content with the delta in experience/knowledge a candidate might have gained between interviews, enough to hire them? This as opposed to continuing to evaluate the candidate against an absolute benchmark.

Because if not, then this sort of evaluation doesn't really help, does it?

[makerman1982]

If people reapply wouldn't they know the interview already? Seems to me TB is obsessed with UDP and thinks it is 70% of what engineering is all about.

[ammon]

User Datagram Protocol? What gives you that impression? In any case, we run several versions of the interview, to allow people to reapply

[thaumasiotes]

> I wonder if someone can come up with a reasonably accurate way to determine how well or easily can a candidate acquire particular skills.

This is known as an "IQ test".