| You're making the common mistake of not thinking through what it's like for the interviewee in that situation. People are notoriously bad at designing technical interviews because they think of it in the lens of what it looks like for them and not what it looks like for the interviewee - You said it's a 1 hour interview. It's really more like a 30 minute interview, because the interviewee will likely spend at least half of that time (probably more) thinking about how you're judging their behavior rather than focusing on the tasks. A good interviewer can prevent this sort of thing from spiraling out of control, but it's never eliminated completely. - #2-#4 are redundant. If the interviewee can create a red circle, they can create more than one of them with a different color. Interviewees will underestimate their time management, so they'll take longer on these trivial tasks. They might even overanalyze what you're trying to do here, thinking that there's more to what you're looking for and spend longer on something trivial - Questions like #3, #5, #9 are the kinds of questions interviewees will overanalyze. They might wonder what you mean, or whether there's more to what you're looking for. They can ask questions, sure, but you expect X and you won't tell them that you expect X, and they'll spend stupid amounts of time wondering what your X is. It's not an exaggeration either. Sometimes interviewers implicitly expect certain things without making them explicit. And you might only find out later (maybe even never), when they tell you that they wanted something that you definitely could've provided but the interviewer never specified. Or worse, you might spend additional time doing X and then they actually wanted Y. Interviewees will try to think about and tease out these things, which takes away substantial time from solving the actual problem - Get rid of delay of 1 second for #8, this just slows down interviewees and doesn't give you as an interviewer any special knowledge about the interviewee - #9 and #10 are basically the same question, get rid of one of them - Use common sense. You probably expected that most of those 20 people should breeze through that interview. If they get something wrong or get confused about something, don't necessarily filter them out -- Think about the weaknesses in your own evaluation before doing that. Interviews are guidelines not hard rules, don't make the process kafkaesque - I'm glad you're asking this sort of thing, because people should absolutely care a lot about false negatives. The 4 that made it might be the best ones, they might be mediocre candidates that were just good at your particular brand of interviewing. You want the best people on the team, not the people that are best at passing some weird interview that has little to do with their job |