I don’t know about Salesforce specifically, but this type of thing is surprisingly common.
If your first interaction with candidates, even from a huge, huge open pipeline of applications, is an automatic request for a time-intensive project or skills assessment, something is very broken with that hiring process.
You simply have to pay the (high & difficult) cost of evaluating & filtering applications and then having a detailed conversation with the small number of applicants you choose to move forward with. You need to understand their technical interests and match to the role, and let them ask lots of questions to even know if they are interested enough to invest time in the rest of the interviewing.
Personally one major change I’ve instituted over a few years in the ML & data science pipeline at my company is that we only do a technical conversational interview, no shared screen coding or take home project at all, it just doesn’t tell you anything, and counterintuitively you end up wasting more time and money administering it than if you just bring people onsite sooner and bite the bullet to evaluate them in a full interview day.
I said f that and still continued my assignment 5 hours later. When they asked me about it I told them the truth, my family came home and I Had to stop. But before I did I left documentation, tests to show my goal, and accepted failure but I personally wanted to solve the problem. Instant hire, even though the interviewers of that round sounded angry that I didn’t finish per the instructions
That’s super rare. Most places won’t even look at your submission at all if it’s one minute past the timed deadline.
I remember doing a timed interview once when I was literally dealing with a harrowing elder care / home hospice ordeal with an aging parent in the next room from where I was coding the interview.
I remember thinking how myopic and un-human that company was (I had explained a little of the situation, they seemed super uncomfortable to hear any more about it, and basically said I could do their timed 2-hour thing like everyone else, take it or leave it).
No room to be a human with a sick parent I guess, or kids or a whole variety of other personal circumstances that make devoting hours of personal time to a coding task a sincerely unrealistic request.
It’s really hard to know who’s telling the truth on both sides. When I’m an interviewer I find this to be a big red flag. Some folks are addicted to a struggle and have an excuse for everything. I don’t mean to diminish your situation but I see it as a bad apple ruined the opportunity for you. People, including interviewers, tend to be creatures of habit.
Why would a company be worried about whether someone is telling the truth about an elder care (or any other) personal situation that renders onerous take-home or timed assignments inappropriate?
If you’re trying to evaluate whether the candidate is telling the truth something is very wrong. There is no reasonable reaction from a company except to say, “you know what, people do have unusual and difficult personal circumstances, and it’s unreasonable to create interview filters you can only successfully devote time to passing when there are no other ‘real life’ issues going on, since this unfairly biases us against otherwise good candidates and makes us come off like we don’t offer pragmatic and realistic understanding of the human condition” and then just stop having take-home / timed coding assessments period.
It has nothing at all to do with that one candidate who alerted you to this. Who cares if they are lying? The point is it’s possible they are not, and overwhelmingly certain that the issue affects other applicants with these kinds of circumstances.
one of the benefits of my current job is they waved the test, so they saved me three+ hours out of my life even before hiring me. They are also paying me quite a bit of money for the market I'm in. I have explicitly said to recruiters that I won't consider moving for less than 16% increase in wage (I mean I named an amount that represents a 16% increase)
A company is moving on me with that increase and I'm starting to think screw it, I don't want to go through the irritating test they will give me. Of course that's because I have a job but still if one is comfortable, why go through the hassle.
If your first interaction with candidates, even from a huge, huge open pipeline of applications, is an automatic request for a time-intensive project or skills assessment, something is very broken with that hiring process.
You simply have to pay the (high & difficult) cost of evaluating & filtering applications and then having a detailed conversation with the small number of applicants you choose to move forward with. You need to understand their technical interests and match to the role, and let them ask lots of questions to even know if they are interested enough to invest time in the rest of the interviewing.
Personally one major change I’ve instituted over a few years in the ML & data science pipeline at my company is that we only do a technical conversational interview, no shared screen coding or take home project at all, it just doesn’t tell you anything, and counterintuitively you end up wasting more time and money administering it than if you just bring people onsite sooner and bite the bullet to evaluate them in a full interview day.