[matthewwolfe]

The downside of take home assessments is that anyone can do it. You could hand off the assignment to a friend, or even hire someone to do it. So figure 1 hour for the take home + 1 hour for an additional interview where we ask questions about the take home to make sure you actually know what you are doing.

At my job, we designed our interview process around the question: “what is the minimum coding exercise that we expect anyone we hire to be able to do?”

This has resulted in an interview where we do ~30 minutes of coding, stuff like: function to reverse a string, function to add an array of numbers, find the largest number in an array of integers.

From there the rest of the interview is conversational. If the candidate is frontend we may dive into X, Y, Z technology. For example, if someone has 5+ years of React experience but doesn’t know what a hook is, that’s a red flag, etc.

You’d be surprised how many people are absolute garbage at those simple coding questions, despite having years of experience. And everyone that cruises those questions has been a great hire thus far, assuming no other red flags like bad culture fit or poor communication etc.

[cosmodisk]

You can outsource the task, but you can't outsource the discussion afterwards. I recently had to hire: shortlisted a couple of candidates and gave them a simple task that shout take 1-2h to complete. I also gave them more than a week to complete it. They could have outsourced it,but they'd struggle to walk me through the whole thing, because you start poking around to see how deep you can ask and it becomes pretty clear pretty soon where their limits are and why they did x over y and etc.