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Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2020) by jedberg on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @03:28PM (#23705437)
When I was at reddit, we did a round of hiring where we published some coding puzzles online, and the solution was the email address of where to send your resume.

Most of the responses were, "I don't want your job, I just wanted to know that I solved the puzzle". I actually hit gmail's sending limit trying to reply to everyone to let them know they solved the puzzle.

So I'd say, people like solving puzzles for the sake of it, and getting praise for doing so.

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2020) by bomdo on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @04:06PM (#23705909)
Can you comment on the kind of engineers that were interested in getting a job this way? Did you hire/interview any of them?
Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2020) by jedberg on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @04:30PM (#23706209)
To start, let me say that I would never do hiring this way now. It was a flawed way to do hiring.

We ended up interviewing many of them. They were all very interested in the job. In most cases it was their second or third job out of college. ie. not junior engineers.

We got some great engineers out of it. In fact I think most of them are still there a decade later.

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2020) by xtracto on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @06:38PM (#23707625)
> To start, let me say that I would never do hiring this way now. It was a flawed way to do hiring.

I'm curious on why you view it as flawed. At a previous place I worked we had something like that (we had a small puzzle in the code version of the homepage source).

We treated it as one of the several "acquisition channels" we had for our funnel (recruiters, job-boards and job fairs were others). All channels were treated the same with regards to evaluation, so for us it was just an additional way to get candidates.

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2020) by jedberg on Friday July 03, 2020 @03:37AM (#23721868)
It's fine if it's one of many channels, but at the time, it was the only way to get considered for the job.

I no longer think quizzes and tests are a good idea.