[mpetrovich]

From both sides as a hiring manager and candidate, I’ve found that a take-home coding challenge that’s tailored to the company is a far better indicator of fit.

With a tailored take-home, the company has a chance to evaluate candidates based on more realistic, holistic challenges than “solve this academic comp sci problem that you won’t actually encounter on the job”. And candidates can get a better sense of the type of work and challenges they’d actually be tackling on the job.

The take-home isn’t tailored to each candidate. The opposite, actually: it needs to be the same for all so that candidates’ solutons can be compared.

Here’s the tl;dr example of a challenge we give web engineering candidates:

“Here’s our API and API docs: <link>. Create an interactive data visualization using D3 and any other tools you’d like. Your submission should include instructions on how to run it.”

By keeping the challenge relatively unconstrained, we allow candidates to show some creativity and prompt them to make the same feature/quality/speed tradeoffs that they’d have to make in the role. We look for autonomous individuals, so this turns out to be a good filter. We encourage them to spend less than 4 hours on it, but our time limit is a pretty generous 1 week since they likely already have a full time job and other interviews.

[gedy]

I very much agree after adding similar at my last company, it was a great way to screen the best-fit hires. Ironically the on-site recruiters didn't like it because it gave better results than their phone screens.