“organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
— M. Conway
Your software architecture reflects your org chart. The interview process you put candidates through reflects your organisational culture. This process sends a loud message about what your company will be like to work for. By definition, the people getting this message are the candidates you’re most interested in hiring. You need to be very careful to ensure you’re sending the right message.
There are a lot of awful technical challenges out there. Some companies ask candidates to spend days building something before they’ve even sat down and spoken to them. That’s just plain disrespectful. If you disrespect candidates, what are you telling them about how they’ll be treated once they’re employees? Good, in-demand candidates will bail out of such a process. Worse, they’ll come to know your company by reputation and won’t apply in the first place (and they’ll probably tell every other quality developer they know to do the same).
So what does working in your organisation look like?
Do you write real code that solves problems? Do that in your hiring process!
Do you review and discuss real code? Do that in your hiring process!
Do you ask people to spend massive amounts of their personal time solving meaningless puzzles with no feedback? No? Great! Make sure you’re not doing that in your hiring process.
After a long weekend of work, I was so exhausted and miffed that I gave up. I told the interviewer I wasn’t interested in the job, but the reality is that I was dismayed at the interview process.
A bad technical interview process filters out good candidates. Top developers are inundated by good offers and opportunities. They’re interviewing you just as much as you’re interviewing them.
Your company succeeds or fails based on the people that work there. You need to get your interview process right to make sure they’re the right people. When you’re hiring technical staff, a technical challenge, done the right way, can be a great component of your process.
Takehome is built specifically to make it easy to give good challenges and hard to give bad ones. Using a takehome.io challenge as part of your hiring process tells candidates that you respect them and their time, and that you care about hiring great people. Start sending positive signals to your candidates.
— David Banham, Takehome
