I was (and still am) interested in hiring people who would challenge manager, TL, ... and speak up if they think something is not right. That was just one of the filters.
If the company you worked at was big/popular enough that you needed a strong filter then I can see the merit of this.
But otherwise, I can't fathom how anyone that is willing to "speak up their mind, challenge manager" would ever consider to apply for a position that radiate manager/HR/recruiter incompetence (and no tech team feedback on the posting?)
People who challenge manager, TL, speaks up because it's their business(or they see it that way) and affects them. Can't see how those kind of people would waste their time voicing their content to a company they spent <10min checking the job postings for.
A few people I hired this or similar ways became my friends and we still connect, get coffee, etc. Your mileage may vary. If you want to hire warm bodies to write code then this is not a good way. If you want to hire people who will make strategic difference to your startup/company, then it is one of the possible ways.
>A few people I hired this or similar ways became my friends and we still connect, get coffee, etc.
Becoming a friend or not is not a causal relation to competence, but rather to your preference. And in this context makes me doubt that what underwater said in his comment might be the real goal: >They're good for determining if the test taker is the test author, and not much else.
More plausible that you only wanted to hire, well, people just like you (and that's why you became friends). Not withstanding the glaring obvious survivor bias. But if it worked, who am I to question it.
> If you want to hire warm bodies to write code then this is not a good way.
Yea but my point wasn't (or yours either) to hire warm bodies, but people that "speak up their mind, challenge manager". And we are talking how efficient(or inefficient) this is, and how many false negatives this method produce. and if your pool of applicants is big enough, it will produce true positives anyway, irrelevant of the efficiency of the filter.
Personally I think even "agreeableness" personality test mumbo-jumbo would be a better metric/filter for gaining people with "speak up their mind, challenge manager" characteristics.
People go through three phases:
1. they are too scared to challenge authority
2. they are not scared of challenging authority
3. they realize they can just go somewhere else
Mature, intelligent Phase 3 people will only challenge authority if they know they're secure in doing so---if they trust you. But why should they trust you? They've never met you, you're just a job ad.
Thinking the same thing. It will filter out good candidates with other options, leaving a worse pool to select from. So in effect probably leading to worse hires.
I wouldn’t waste my time if I thought the hiring manager/recruiter is so incompetent. I’d have read that and bucketed the company as one of those looking to tick the boxes in years of experience.
As long as not every good candidate thinks this, it could still work quite well. Doubt it's a good tactic in general, but if you have enough applicants otherwise and only need to fill few positions, this might be an effective way to filter them.
I think your experience would strongly depend on whether people listen when you tell them they are wrong. I think you will enjoy it if they actually do listen and fix things you point out as wrong.
Most gotcha tests like this are trying to filter for a general attribute with a overly specific response. Which, coincidentally, turns out to be the exact response that the interviewer would have had. They're good for determining if the test taker is the test author, and not much else.
