[mihaaly]

It is a bit naive expecting reliable answer for such unspecific question for that a broad spectrum situation. The topic here is to discuss the problem and even that is too much for the limits of this medium to be complete and reliable. What was your point with your useless and not constructive complaining? : )

[MauranKilom]

Imagine your friend has to hire new people for his team. You just communicated to him that he sucks at "estimating technical competence" with his "unreliable excuse activities masking gut feeling decisions" and that his "overly simplistic tests only measure how good someone is in those tests, not how good someone will be in a position".

Of course, he would love to have a direct measure for how good someone will be in a position. Who wouldn't? So he asks you "well what should I do then?". What do you say?

To be clear, this is a hard problem. There are many dimensions for "how good someone will be in a position", and the interview process is designed to filter along as many of those as possible with reasonable effort.

Ultimately there's only one reliable way to find out if the candidate passes all the thresholds in day-to-day work: Hire them. But you can't do that with every candidate.

[mihaaly]

Being the process multi dimensional was my point exactly, thank you for expressing that so explicitly!

But those pressured simplistic tests are not simply part of the whole picture but an exclusion barrier to throw away candidates and easing the life of the lazy recruiters!!

You must not be serious you do not see that!

My friends have broader perspective and make much more competent hiring procedures than this schoolboy mentality of whiteboarding or asking 5 questions to throw away those work in real life not in artificial simplistic tests!

Yes, it takes longer than the simplistic ones, because it is so multi dimensional that any less would be an incompetent process for god's sake!!

Anyone insisting those simplistic ones as definitive barriers - not merely part of a process - want to have excuse to get rid of the whole activity very quickly, doing bang up job! Not really care about real competence but superficial characteristics only that can be point at very quickly!

There are multitude of ways handling this matter much much better - too long to elaborate here -, I met with several ones, failing or succeeding, heard about the rest. All taking the effort that any reliable hiring effort requires, unlike these very simplistic ones criticized here.