>The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time.

I see more and more companies doing this small projects type of initial screening. I like it. But time is actually an expensive cost. Suppose your candidate makes $130,000 per year, which isn't even a high salary in bay area. Then if he/she spends 15 hours on this project, then we are talking about 1000 bucks. Now that is quite a cost, isn't it?

Honestly compared to a white board programming puzzle, such projects always make more sense to me. But most companies will still do white-boards during on-site after the initial project. And although I like most of those projects, even in my case, if I happen to be busy, then I do feel like they are annoying. I'd rather spend my time doing what I was busy doing, or learning new stuff, or working on my pet projects, rather than working on a project that may or may not make sense to me, just to show to other people that I can code, and I can write clean code. Let alone I happen to know some friends who just hate those projects and will never do them unless it's from their dream company. Plus, there are people who are better communicator when they talk face-to-face. Then it's really hard to say if such project is really better than white-boarding for that type of candidates. But it's still way better than those 30-minutes online coding over a phone interview. That's the one I hate most.. Even Skype interview is better than phone interview.

One solution is to give a free pass for people who have public open source projects to show off.

Instead of presenting the "screening project", they present their open source project and its source code.

> The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time.

As in working for you for free, and on a WE to boot?

For a student or someone who is unemployed, that might work.

For someone with a job and a family life, I don't think so. Especially if that person can command a $120k+ salary.

No. As in working for the common good for free.

We invited people to come up with ways to improve the job market, which is clearly broken. Some chose to do that, while others had their own apps already in mind.

One group made contactr.io, an extension for Google Chrome that shows you the email addresses of the founders of the company website you're visiting.

Another group is working on a project called livelyhood, which will be a sort of LinkedIn 2.0 where candidates can share their work easily.

The participants worked for themselves, helped each other, and walked away with a larger network of people who recognized their qualities.

This weekend was specifically designed for people whose resumes would not automatically "command" a $120K salary. They were the ones languishing in the slush pile.

We held the event on a weekend so that people who already had jobs, albeit jobs they were unhappy with, could join us.

If you like your weekends more than good work, then it definitely would not have been the right fit.

> If you like your weekends more than good work, then it definitely would not have been the right fit.

Seriously????

Dude, they get to contribute to the company for free.

I almost spit out my coffee when the OP stated "for free", as if not having to pay anything but time, my most valuable asset, was some perk.

I'm sure the OP means well, and it may have been a success for them, but I don't know anyone in my circle who would participate in something like this, unless they were utterly desperate for a job. I thought there was a serious talent crunch? Who is courting whom?

I wonder what sort of engineers self-select in a process like this?

One reason why engineers and companies have trouble discussing the job market is that talented people who know how to craft their resumes don't imagine that any other kind of candidate exists.

Unemployed people have lots of time. Understand that and you'll understand why a weekend like this makes sense.

One reason they're unemployed is that they don't know how to demonstrate their value. A lot of engineers are actually poor at communicating, and not that great at resumes.

This weekend was for them.

Ones that are young enough not to know any better. This is a double-win for a company that only wants to hire 22 year olds anyway, as it avoids having to hide under the hazy fog of "culture fit", and they get free work out of the deal to boot.

See above. We didn't ask them to work for us.

You can't put a price on that!

So you'd rather do a five hour technical interview than work on a toy project for five hours? Personally I'd rather do the latter.

You root through 15 candidates for a job. All equal, I have a 1 in 15 chance of getting a job from an individual interview.

15 weekends of hard work just to change job? Yes, very efficient.

The arrogance of your approach makes my blood boil.

Your blood is boiling because your reading comprehension is low.

We had several positions to fill, and we helped good candidates whom we couldn't hire get in touch with other employers. The chances of an interview were much higher than 1 in 15. In fact, we made eight interview offers.

The weekend was totally voluntary, not cheap for us, and everyone knew exactly what they were getting into. It was one weekend, not 15 weekends.

If you think weekends like that are inefficient, consider the job market as it operates currently. If you can think of a more efficient way for it to work, I would love to hear it.

If you are trying to sell that it was not an arrogant approach, the last two paragraphs make sense.

The bit where you call me stupid...

Interestingly, Google itself still extensively uses resumes. In fact, I've been asked by Google recruiters to include "Everything you can" in the resume.

This sounds like a really interesting idea. I probably takes a weekend to prepare a proper application anyway, so spending the time on a project (which may be fun even) sounds much better.

This is a good interview process for a coding gig. I am a devops engineer who is mainly a system administrator. I code but I code as a tool not as a goal. So for this kind of positions looking for coding performance does not give good indicators. Or you can not do this kind of experiment for other kinds of positions.