> Make the work-sample challenges as determinative as possible. Candidates who do well on our work-sample challenges are presumed technically qualified; 1:1 interviews that follow it are largely pro-forma. At Matasano / NCC Group (while I was there) the bar for a technical interviewer to overrule the output of the work sample challenges was quite high.
I would argue that this worked for your hiring field because you had a secondary bar of "technical competence" but a primary bar of "motivated persistence". And your tests definitely set a bar for persistence.
The real problem most companies are currently facing is simply that no one wants to take the time to train someone. Most companies would be better served by training someone internally and then promoting them into the higher slot and then backfilling the more junior position where the stakes are lower.
The HR problem is that you have to fight to adjust someone's salary properly after that promotion. I think I have won an internal salary adjustment fight only once in all the years I have been responsible for hiring people. Hiring an outsider at $100K is easier than promoting someone and getting them a raise from $80K to $100K--and it's completely stupid.
I think there's a lot of truth to this, and to the argument that work-sample testing really only works as well as I like to say it does when you have an engineering culture that can metabolize new hires without much previous experience in your particular problem domain. But we started doing work-samples for the opposite reason: because we kept getting bamboozled by good interviewers --- a problem I know to be rife across the whole industry. I still think you're better off keeping most of the weight of your qualification process on practical challenges rather than interviews.
We have not generally had a problem recruiting people with experience in our field, but there's obviously some selection bias in that observation.
I would argue that this worked for your hiring field because you had a secondary bar of "technical competence" but a primary bar of "motivated persistence". And your tests definitely set a bar for persistence.
The real problem most companies are currently facing is simply that no one wants to take the time to train someone. Most companies would be better served by training someone internally and then promoting them into the higher slot and then backfilling the more junior position where the stakes are lower.
The HR problem is that you have to fight to adjust someone's salary properly after that promotion. I think I have won an internal salary adjustment fight only once in all the years I have been responsible for hiring people. Hiring an outsider at $100K is easier than promoting someone and getting them a raise from $80K to $100K--and it's completely stupid.