[noblethrasher]

That’s disgusting, and I’m really sorry to have read that happened to you or anyone else.

My policy is that anyone that completes the technical screen (2 – 4 hours of work) gets an on-site interview.

Just this morning, I had to spend about 20 minutes debugging a candidate’s code to get it to both build and run, but he’s still getting invited for an on-site.

[SkyPuncher]

I don't care about being turned away (I did a very similar project for another company, that I now happily work for).

However, it's infuriating to have spent so much time just to learn that the engineering team didn't want me anyways. If I got rejected for a bad work sample - that's fine. Getting rejected because the hiring manager couldn't be bothered to look at your resume before assigning tasks - not cool.

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Good on you for bringing candidates in. Technical screens are tough and can be mis-understood by candidates. They should only be a tool to support other data points.

[underwater]

Are you really likely to hire this candidate? Asking him to commit even more time when he's started off so poorly seems like an (unknown to him) poor use of his time.