[discardorama]

This is probably doable if you're interviewing 1 candidate a week (or one in 2 weeks). Most tech companies run through several candidates a week; and finding engineers/designers/managers who will play along with your question will be very difficult. I've been to interviews where they didn't know I was coming that day; where interviewers failed to turn up; where wrong interviewers showed up; etc. etc.

Basically, interviewing is a clusterfuck. :-)

[hagmonk]

I know where you're coming from there. It depends on the company. I think hiring is the most important thing a company does, so it's really critical to get everyone wanting to participate. I'd suggest that most push back folks get is because people generally dislike having to interview - they are tired of meeting lots of B grade candidates and even a few hours a week feels like a drag.

Having said that, there are ways to offload. There's a biotech startup (I'd have to dig for their name, I remember they did all their coding in mathematica) that described their hiring process to me. Hopefully I'm not messing up the details too badly.

I recall one guy who went through it said it was way more stressful than his final year university exams. They tested candidates, all candidates, on physics, math, chemistry, biology, computer science, and more. Candidates were given projects in each area, and a week to complete all of them.

It was deliberately structured so that there was no possible way that anyone could humanly complete the entire set of tests, much less while also working a full time job. This was deliberate, so that they could observe how candidates chose to prioritize. They also wanted to give people more than they could do to stimulate a "by any means necessary" approach they knew would be required in the actual job.

Finally, it also caused a lot of people to say "erm, no thanks. That's a ridiculous amount of work", which they rationalized as being a good test for candidates who saw a mountain of work and then baulked.

Not sure if I'd use a technique like this myself, but I found the idea interesting!