Re:I will not hack on your codebase for free in an interview
by jwarkentin on Thursday December 05, 2013 @02:19PM
(#6856504)
I absolutely agree. I think that it's important to first establish interest and weed out candidates that are obviously unqualified. You can figure a lot of that out in a short amount of time. While some of your best candidates may already be employed and thus only casually interested initially, at least for someone like myself that interest could increase significantly after sitting down and chatting about the company and projects for a bit. If I were to then become really interested it could be worth spending a lot more time in an interview process.
Personally I don't think that a company will learn much more from 8 hours or more than they could learn in 3-4 hours tops though. I think it's overkill in most situations.
If you're casually interested the aim shouldn't be to do a day long technical interview, it should be to establish what the real level of interest is and to either build that interest or establish that it's the wrong thing for you / us. Once we've done that we're either in a situation where you're keen on the role and we're looking at something where a day might be a good investment for you, or we've saved us both a day.
Making a significant time investment when one party isn't serious about the opportunity is the wrong thing to do for both company and candidate, and throwing money at the problem doesn't change that.
Ultimately I'd like to show you I value your time by not wasting it, rather than by paying for it if that makes sense?