Work Sample Tests - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

This resource first appeared in issue #107 on 29 Jan 2022 and has tags Hiring: Other, Hiring: Interviewing and Evaluating

One of the things we can do to make ourselves more successful hiring is having really clear goals for what we’re hiring for - what a successful hire would be doing day to day in the job. Then we can perform principled and transparent evaluations of the candidate’s ability to start doing those things.

In the first resource, Kaplan-Moss has fleshed out his series on what does and doesn’t make a good work sample test in technology. There are good introductory sections, including goals for a fair test (they should simulate real work, be no more than 3 hours work, be flexible with scheduling, provide as much choice as possible, use them to start discussions rather than be scored pass/fail; they shouldn’t be surprises, tested internally, and be late in the process). Then he talks about different options - coding homework, pair programming, bring your own code, reverse code review, and labs and simulation environments. There’s good concluding sections too, especially on what doesn’t work (including white-boarding code).