My company, a fully remote consulting firm, uses test projects for some candidates whose skills we cannot fully evaluate using the code samples they have submitted. We only use test projects under conditions designed to skirt the clear pitfalls mentioned in this article.
- We pay all candidates for the test project, whether they pass or fail. The original article did not mention paying for homework, which we concluded was the only fair way to treat the excess time candidates spend helping us make a decision.
- Passing the test project means you move on in the process; we don't knowingly pit two candidates against each other.
- The project and a corresponding scoring rubric are predefined by position.
I also think paying for the time is the only way it can be fair, in particular for more experienced candidates who will resent the time wasted as opposed to junior candidates who could see it as being given an opportunity.
This lines up with what I finally concluded (and blogged about) as well - find some small, somewhat isolated project and pay them for it. My preference would be for it to be a project you actually intend to use, especially if they also need to interact with your team in some small way. This way you get to actually seem them in action - how do they communicate, what questions do they ask, how do they approach the project. You see the candidate in the context in which you intend for them work.
We've toyed with either paying them for something we can use or asking them to add a feature to one of the open source projects under our care — but in either case, you lose the reliability and objectivity of the task, because different candidates will have better or worse prompts. Using the same prompt for everyone means we can use the same rubric for everyone.
It'd be interesting to see paying candidates for there time during an interview process to be used as a form of money laundering...
"So please explain to me what you did to attract 121,498 applications for this job, the reasoning behind paying $500 to each & every applicant for the the time they spent interviewing, and why each applicant has a name like John Doe1, John Doe2, John DoeN, etc."
This seems like a method for anti-money laundering? Taking money that you already legitimately hold and turning it into money that you can't explain. I'm not sure I see the use.
- We pay all candidates for the test project, whether they pass or fail. The original article did not mention paying for homework, which we concluded was the only fair way to treat the excess time candidates spend helping us make a decision.
- Passing the test project means you move on in the process; we don't knowingly pit two candidates against each other.
- The project and a corresponding scoring rubric are predefined by position.