[Clubber]

No. Talk to them, get a feel, if they are a fit, hire them for a 3 month contract. If they aren't any good, don't hire them. If they are really bad, cut the contract short.

You will never know what someone is capable of in a few hours. People who think that works are just fooling themselves and turning away good talent.

[Arainach]

And what of people who don't want to leave existing full time employment for a three month contract that might turn into a job if things work out well? Similarly, I doubt most people would be willing to move to a city for a temporary contract.

[Clubber]

Usually if people are looking around, they are pretty fed up with the place they are at for one reason or another. If it's a good developer, they would know they would make the cut, so they would take it if it were a decent company with decent pay.

Also, there is no distinction between a full time job and a temporary contract in terms of survivability in the US. Most states are at-will states, and not being able to do the work is a fire-able offense. Just about everyone knows this.

Most people who have been in the business a while aren't willing to move to a new city, again unless you are willing to pay ungodly sums of money. If you are hiring right out of college and junior-mid's, this technique is better suited, but still, you're competing poorly in a seller's market.

I mean, just because you are hiring and paying a salary doesn't mean 20 other companies in your area aren't doing the same. What makes you better? Certainly not market rates and certainly not your exhaustive and mostly ineffective interview process.

You want a good person, ask your tops if they know anyone good, then try to lure them away with an offer of 1.2x - 1.5x market rates, depending on the return you expect from them. Trust your tops and don't put them through this silly process. Have the top interview them with you in the room. Spend about an hour with them to make sure they aren't some weirdo. Trust me, they'll respect you more if you respect their time.

[praneshp]

> You will never know what someone is capable of in a few hours.

I guess the goal is to fine tune your interviewing process based on how past candidates turned out.

[Clubber]

I'd bet dollars to doughnuts the people doing this are collecting zero data to analyze to see if this new process improves or hurts the number of good candidates they actually hire.

The irony of it is putting processes like this is actually turning away good talent, but they wouldn't know, because they aren't doing any analysis; they just read an article somewhere.

[toast0]

You can certainly do analysis on the hires you make, but it's pretty hard to analyze the hires you didn't make. Very few will come back and reinterview.

[Clubber]

Sure you can, but my point was I'll bet most people don't. They just get this crap from an article they read because they don't think about all the ramifications, or don't think about it much at all.

[praneshp]

Sorry about the late reply, but you are wrong about "collecting zero data". Without saying too much I can assure you at least one company does.

[qudat]

For some businesses, they aren't hiring a ton of developers, so doing an analysis on 2-5 data points isn't going to yield anything significant.

[Clubber]

Why would the introduce such a radical break from traditional interviewing without testing to see if it works?

[qudat]

> Why would the introduce such a radical break from traditional interviewing without testing to see if it works?

Has "traditional interviewing" undergone any scientific study for determining if it "works"?

[Clubber]

I don't know, I'm sure there is something on Google if you are interested.