[dijit]

Devils advocate (really not affiliated with oxide, but I have worked for a “desirable” employer before).

How would you handle a few thousand applicants for a single role?

I think no matter what you do it will feel inhumane, we can argue that a few hours of work for a take home test is inhumane too, being ghosted after doing one definitely wouldn’t pass my personal bar of acceptability, but if its the first stage and the task would take a properly qualified applicant less than 30 minutes then I can’t fault.

How would you do things? remember that it has to scale and you cant leave any gaps based on human fallibility (HR/Hiring Managers are humans and will forget if there are too many things going on at once).

[jaggederest]

There's a simple answer, if someone is doing a substantial amount of work for your interview process, pay them an amount of money that is more than zero but less than "do job interviews for a living". Or provide that amount times two to a charity of their choice.

I've done this for hiring before, for people who reached the "put substantial effort in" stage (in my case basically 2nd or 3rd round work sample stuff), and it was a great way to make sure we got good signal and they felt respected.

[dijit]

“put substantial effort into it” is such a personal thing.

DDG hires like this, actually, and if I recall correctly I would be paid a flat fee, it would take a week, and the work I did would be part of something genuine in DDG, maybe a bug or something.

Now, that probably sounds good to you, but taking a week out of my current employment is not going to happen- there’s an incentive to go “over the hours” inherent to the ask, even if you’re paying me a flat rate, I might lose to someone equally qualified who puts in 1.01n into the task, so I should put 1.02n (etc; ad infinitum).

Which is part of the issue with all take home assignments. I have given out take home assignments (given to HR to be administered) which should take a qualified candidate 20 minutes to finish beginning to end (as in, including syncing the project, setting up their editor, exploring the problem, googling around about things, trying it out and then following up with the email to HR). I don’t doubt for even a moment that someone has spent several hours on this problem- because they’re not qualified.

Passing the HR barrier in that case will not help them unfortunately, because they’ll get to talk to me, and I will disqualify them in all likelihood, and candidates are told that it should take not more than a half hour, but en masse: people don’t listen.

The trouble is, theres thousands of applicants, a handful of HR, and one me.

Not to be on some kind of pedestal (I’m not), but the problem doesn’t scale, you need only apply the tiniest amount of systems thinking to see it.

[jaggederest]

Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage.

And I would make it very clear that putting in more than 30 minutes of work, timed, is a disqualifier, and I would sleep well at night clearing all those people out of the queue.

[dijit]

Hundreds of good applicants can’t be whittled down to a dozen without being very picky about things in the resume which may just be a poor representation.

You will bias heavily along some kind of axis, preferred previous employers or location, age, etc.

You add a lot of bias into the system by trying to further scrutinise otherwise meaningfully qualified people on paper.

[jaggederest]

Once again, you're misunderstanding the goal of the system if you think that it's necessary to deliberately whittle down hundreds of good applicants through careful process to get a great hire.

Hint: you don't even need to evaluate most candidates at all. Random sampling is sufficient and provably bias free.

[dijit]

Reminds me of something I heard once.

> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash

> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.

What do you send them as a response "sorry, we're going ahead with other applicants" - "you have not been selected this time" -- what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?

Peak humanity.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

>should take a qualified candidate 20 minutes to finish beginning to end (as in, including syncing the project, setting up their editor, exploring the problem, googling around about things, trying it out and then following up with the email to HR

So about six minutes for the problem itself, then?

[IshKebab]

Yeah I just got a new job and they sent me swag for getting to a certain (quite early) stage in the interview process. Awesome idea.

It was for an investment bank though and they have essentially unlimited money. I can't imagine any of the other companies I've worked for would be remotely generous enough to do the same.

[jaggederest]

Hiring is expensive linearly to the salary of the people you're trying to hire, so if any of the companies you've worked for were trying to hire well, it'd be a rounding error. Back of the envelope is 90 days of salary, minimum, is the cost to hire, so there's no reason to be miserly about it - if you can't afford it, you can't afford to hire at all.

[fred_is_fred]

From a legal and financial perspective it seems like it would be difficult to pay people to do interview homework. There's tax implications and other issues like state labor laws.

[icedchai]

People do contract / temporary / 1099 work all the time. It's very simple.

[throwaway219450]

If you truly believe you’re “scaling” you do it the Google way and have a strict loop with a good rubric for the interview so applicants are comparable. The whole point of that system is thousands of people and hundreds of interviewers, and a very standard process. I’ve always found it pretty fair even with some randomness in scoring.

You shouldn’t be giving take homes unless they’re either short, or the applicant passed a screen and you’re investing time. Otherwise how are you “scaling” the review? Claude? Hidden test suite (not bad)? Some sort of leaderboard (bad, rewards people with time), something else?

[dijit]

I’ve been through the Google process and I wouldn’t consider it to be the opposite of inhumane.

[throwaway219450]

Well “humane” and fair aren’t necessarily the same, and some people hate loops.

I like programming problems, spending a day at Google was fun, they put me up in a fancy hotel, and the interviewers were nice. Like it was clear a lot of time and money had gone into the process (6-8 hours of dev time is not cheap), not a zoom and ghost like most companies.

[DANmode]

Use less negatives.

[dijit]

it was intentionally this way

[DANmode]

I probably should have spotted that, lol