[marcgg]

If you sum it all up, it is less than a day. The phone screening is ~20 minutes, the assignment takes a couple of hours and so on.

I think it's fair to expect that a candidate is willing to invest at least 5-6 hours in an interview process. Compared to what I've seen before (full day interviews, freelance period etc) this seems fair to me. But like you comment proves, it might not be for everybody.

[Bahamut]

A take home assignment alone is likely more than a work day, if not multiples - I'll take a 7 hour onsite interview gauntlet over that any day.

The only side this process seems to be favorable for is the company interviewing.

To give a flip side, I just finished interviewing with over 10 companies in a rigorous search. Of those, two did take home tests, and ultimately I didn't have the time to complete either, especially since the requirements were written in a way where candidates were encouraged to dump a lot of time into them. My schedule was filled with many high stakes interviews, which was mentally exhausting. It simply is not in my interest to do a take home project, as it reduces the number of companies I can simultaneously interview at.

[marcgg]

From experience we saw that for most people doing the coding test was only taking ~an evening which seems reasonable as it removes the need for more on site discussions.

I guess that it's true that the take home assignment is not optimal if you interviews with more than 10 companies and in this case we must be loosing some candidates.

[computereye]

They lie. Most candidates will tell you the coding exercise took less than it actually did because 1) they want to appear efficient 2) you said it would take only 3 hours so if they say it took 8 hours it would look like a failure

Source: me, last week, for another company. Plus, programming is not just writing code, most technical interviewers will want to see the global design, unit tests, comments, etc... Which are not accounted for in the expected time

[hack_edu]

If this is the case, you are merely writing a piece of "our interview process is entirely average." I don't know about you, but 5-6 hours is standard. What's the point of breaking out your day-of process into 4 bullet points if its just the same as your normal engineering interview? Fluff.

Finally, realize that your candidates (just like your Eng org) spend much more time prepping for your interview than you quantify on paper. However much they choose to is up to them, but don't pretend you're doing them a favor.

[marcgg]

I never said our interview process was perfect, I mainly wanted to share it because I saw a lot of people complaining about whiteboard coding and so on... so I figured it could be interesting to some to see a less exhausting alternative.

[CodeMage]

Just a small observation: whiteboard coding is not inherently wrong. Bad experiences with whiteboard coding usually come from dealing with companies with broken hiring process, where simply eliminating whiteboard coding and replacing it with something else wouldn't help.

[marcgg]

I completely agree, this was just an example of a common complain.