Take Home Task stage of Job Interviews is a lost opportunity
There is a lot of controversy surrounding the “Take Home Task” interview stage and rightly so — a lot of such tasks are perceived as a written exam by their creators and of course nobody likes exams especially if there is only 1 diploma for 300 applicants.
However it does not make the concept of “Take Home Task” inherently flawed. It just means that designing a THT is an easy thing to screw up if you don’t have enough experience.
If you would like to design a Take Home Task that allows you to learn more about your candidate and build some trust — below are four points that will help you start.
Realistic content. Prepare a task in a way that not only emulates your team’s tech stack, but also focuses on the day-to-day tasks that are a part of your team’s life. There is nothing more upsetting than writing a nice service from scratch for a THT and then learning that you’ll be doing refactoring 90% of the time.
Authentic work environment. If your team operates on trust and creativity — provide less directions. If your team operates with well defined requirements — detail them as such. If a necessary part of your daily life is closely interfacing with other engineers — give out an email of one of the virtual colleagues for contact.
A playground, not a trial. Provide as much space for the candidate to make choices as possible, this way you will learn about their internal motivators, values and their default working style. Don’t forget to make these choices meaningful by also setting a number of clear restrictions — be it time, performance or UX constraints. Focus on learning more about the candidate rather than judging how good they are.
Be explicit. Communicate what are you trying to achieve with the Take Home Task. If the candidate is still not up for it afterwards — it won’t be a good fit for your team. This stuff happens and you’ve just saved some time for both of you.
The relationship between the company and the candidate during the interview is akin to speed dating. You have so little time to really get to know each other — it would be a total waste to use this interview stage as a glorified Code Quality checklist. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to see the candidate being their most relaxed self during the whole interview process: solving an engaging problem in the comfort of their own home.
