[septimus111]

How are companies supposed to evaluate candidates without giving them some form of busywork? The best way I can think of is to pay them to complete a project but that's not possible when you are interviewing loads of candidates.

[jacquesm]

Introduce them to the team they will be working with, have them do a code review or take a ticket and find their way through docs and discuss a potential solution.

In general teams are a much better judge of talent and ability than recruiters or your typical interviewer, especially in a normal work setting.

[empthought]

That's really expensive for the team in terms of time investment for possibly no payoff. Someone has to make sure that a candidate that gets to that point has a good chance of being hired. That person is "your typical interviewer."

[jacquesm]

Your typical interviewer, if he or she does not have relevant knowledge is just as likely to throw out the baby with the bathwater as they are to select the right candidates. There is no reason not to have the team do the pre-selection. I know this is all terrible news for recruiters and HR people alike but really there is nobody better qualified to determine who they want to work with on a particular problem than the existing team. The only situation where you would be better off with other people making that decision is when there is no team yet.

One thing I used to totally loathe during my brief stint as a programmer employed at a large organization is that when new people showed up that were already hired it was then up to us on the floor to make the best of a whole series of bad decisions preceding that moment.

So, let's involve the team in the messaging and pre-selection as well as giving them the final say.

Think about it this way: if you believe that the team you employ is the best possible group to do the work, don't you feel they are also the best possible group to determine how to expand the group?

[35bge57dtjku]

> Your typical interviewer, if he or she does not have relevant knowledge is just as likely to throw out the baby with the bathwater as they are to select the right candidates. There is no reason not to have the team do the pre-selection.

What are you talking about? The interviewers are almost always from the team.

> Think about it this way: if you believe that the team you employ is the best possible group to do the work, don't you feel they are also the best possible group to determine how to expand the group?

Yes, and that's why most companies have their devs do interviewing.

[Paul-ish]

What do you do when tons of people apply for a position?

[jacquesm]

Find a better way to reach your target audience. Getting people to self-select is the very best way to reduce the load from interviewing.

[Paul-ish]

How would you do that? Also, saying there will be a coding interview up front does cause people to self select.