| The principles below are specifically for take-home tests, though some will still apply to technical interviews conducted live: 1. Design tests to be open-ended and demonstrate how a candidate thinks, rather than ones that drive toward a binary pass/fail outcome. Asking why a candidate worked on the pieces they did and where they would focus if given more time gets you high signal without requiring as much time from the candidate. 2. Provide clarity on the grading rubric. When candidates understand how they'll be evaluated, they'll spend less time on work that doesn't result in higher signal to the company. For example, having a candidate write some tests or talk through how they would approach testing is great! Expecting full test coverage isn't as useful. 3. Scoping is the toughest part about test design. Try to choose topics that closely mirror the day-to-day work in the role itself but that can be boiled down to a 1-2 hour task. You want to make sure that candidates who perform well are more likely to succeed if hired, but you also want to keep it short. From interviewing 50 hiring managers who designed the hiring processes at Basecamp/Medium/Mailchimp/etc, they revealed that the candidates who were ultimately hired consistently spent 2x the recommended time, which means that designing a 3-hour take-home is asking top candidates to commit 6 hours. It's a tough ask in the current hiring climate. Here are 3 examples for inspiration: - Full-stack role for Flow Club (YC S21) that runs virtual WeWork sessions: https://app.mightyacorn.io/flow-club/founding-front-end-engi... - Front-end role for Playhouse (YC S21), building TikTok for real estate: https://app.mightyacorn.io/demo/playhouse-hiring-challenge - Back-end role for zero5, a parking automation startup: https://app.mightyacorn.io/zero5/challenge-fullstack-softwar... Happy to share more details if you have specific questions! Source: my team spent the past 6 months designing personalized take-home tests for 20 VC-backed startups hiring founding engineers. We evaluated ~500 candidate submissions. |