No one should be doing work before an interview even begins, especially a task this large.

[justinharkey]

I'll give credit to the company for having good pay, good benefits, great PTO, and a good product.

However, no one should be working this much before an application process and interview has even begun. It's a bad call. You, as the hiring company, will have to bear the weight of sifting through bad applicants. Make a very short, 5 question, 5 minute, questionnaire to get rid of the bottom of the barrel people.

This level of effort to even begin an application is unfair to the applicants, speaks poorly of the industry at large right now, and brings bad press your way. Hoping for an adjustment to how applicants are expected to begin. Thank you.

[SleeplessByte]

Thanks you for the well structured thought. I don't work for Exercism but I have forwarded this issue to some people who do. I expect them to relay their thoughts in the near future about this.

[iHiD]

Hi Justin.

Thanks for taking the time to write that issue. Inspired by you and a few other folks who have been proactive in trying to make this better, I've opened this repository where we can discuss stuff.

I'd love for you to read my overarching response (see https://github.com/exercism/job-application-process#background) and then let me know your thoughts here.

You, as the hiring company, will have to bear the weight of sifting through bad applicants

Specifically on this point, the hiring company is "me" effectively. I am reviewing the applicants while also running the whole organisation. And if we have hundreds per day, that's not achievable. How we can solve that while not giving applicants a huge burden is something I'd love to hear your thoughts on.

Thanks 🙂

[asleepysamurai]

Specifically on this point, the hiring company is "me" effectively. I am reviewing the applicants while also running the whole organisation. And if we have hundreds per day, that's not achievable.

Well that's the tough pill. If you want to hire someone for your team, this is a price you have to pay. You have to put in the time to talk to people. What you're saying comes of as "my time is too valuable to waste, so instead I'm going to waste the time of every single applicant". Which is very off-putting, and a lot of capable people would flat out refuse to interview under such dynamics. In which case you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Perhaps if you really need to cut down the number of applicants, why not try a much simpler exercise? 10 questions, testing HTML/CSS/Javascript or whatever it is that you want to test for, with answers that shouldn't be more than a couple of sentences long. Something along the lines of this is the code, this is the expected output, does it match, why or why not?

Then pick those who pass that, and spend some time talking to them, before blasting on with the rest of the process.

[SaschaMann]

Perhaps if you really need to cut down the number of applicants, why not try a much simpler exercise? 10 questions, testing HTML/CSS/Javascript or whatever it is that you want to test for, with answers that shouldn't be more than a couple of sentences long. Something along the lines of this is the code, this is the expected output, does it match, why or why not?

The README mentions this is planned already:

If you were on the community call last week, you'll know we'd already decided the challenge was too big and that we wanted to split into two parts. Nearly everyone that's applied so far has been rejected on the visual (CSS / attention to visual detail) part of the challenge. So we decided to separate out the HTML/CSS part, asking only for that to be submitted, before being put through to the JavaScript "phase" of the application. I hoped that this would reduce the initial barrier of asking someone to commit many hours to the project before getting any feedback. Sadly, this blew up today before we'd had chance to rewrite things.

The CSS bit apparently takes people roughly an hour, which is more or less the same as a remote screening interview.

[justinharkey]

@iHiD Thank you for responding to myself and the community at large.

As someone who has hired for this exact position in the past, I can relate to wanting to filter out people without having to spend weeks sifting through unqualified individuals. On the other hand I still believe a task to apply before even speaking with a candidate is not fair to the candidate. Again, giving credit to you and your company, you seem to have a good position here and I don't think you were trying to farm free work.

Overall I think the much reduced task is a step in the right direction. I'd still like to see a quick technical test of only a few questions. At our company we asked only four JavaScript questions: 1) Given a string of "a string", reverse the string. 2) Do it with chaining. 3) Write a function that returns if a number is a prime. 4) Using any method you like make a request to our site and return the titles on the homepage (we did not have a public API).

This test could be done by senior level people in less than 4 minutes. Positive signs included solving questions 1 and 2 at the same time. Someone said question 3 was NP Complete and we accepted that answer with no code. Most higher level devs also used recursion where low level devs did not. It was a lightning quick way to filter most unqualified candidates out and I think you could easily implement something similar.

I think something else that would help is to put the job listing details such as pay and benefits here so people can have context. I think some of the negativity came from them finding this in a void and assumed it was just scamming for free work.

Thank you for continuing the discussion, feel free to send further thoughts.