Home Challenge — For Companies
In the last few years, it has become very popular to give a home challenge to candidates, especially in tech roles, after a first call with a recruiter and before further interviews.
The benefit for the company, is that the candidate invests several hours, and someone from within the company reviews it and spends considerably less time. The review is also done asynchronously, so no need to coordinate the time. The company can then screen candidates who did not do well enough, and assess their level.
This is oftentimes also desirable by the candidates — they work on the task on a less stressful situation than a live coding interview. They work on it in their free time, take as much time as they want, and decide wether they want to spend more time to achieve a better result, or not.
But let’s think of it entirely from the candidate’s perspective: she could be interviewing for several companies, having to work on several home challenges.
Remember — it’s not only the company who has to accept the candidate, but also the candidate has to like the company and want to work for it, in other words — the candidate has to accept the company. Today it is done as part of the interview — the candidate can judge based on the people she interacted with and is usually left 10 to 15 minutes to ask her questions.
This doesn’t sound ideal for the candidate to make a decision, and is not very fair, merely from the time investment perspective.
Radical suggestion:
the candidate should prepare a home challenge for the company.
This way, the candidate can reject companies that “failed” the home challenge.
Of course, you could still ask questions during the traditional interview, but only after you were interviewed. It could also happen that the interviewer has no immediate answers, or asking the right person will happen only in the second or third interview in that company. With the challenge, you wait for an asynchronous response. You also don’t need to memorize their answers during the interview.
The challenge should not contain questions about working hours and salary, but rather make the hiring manager think about things that are important to the candidate, from technical to cultural and behavioral aspects.
It should include questions about the current and past status and behavior, not opinions or assumptions regarding the future.
Examples for developers:
- Do you have a library containing professional books? Which ones for example?
Shows their approach towards continuous learning - Is every developer on the team familiar with SOLID principles?
Which design patterns are you using in the codebase?
Demonstrates how strong the team is with object oriented design - Is everyone on the team writing automated tests and CI/CD is in place?
Approach towards quality - Why did the last developer leave your team?
Gives clues about the culture - Is there a technical roadmap?
Shows if the company is completely a product shop or has a tech plan - When was the last time someone got promoted, and for what?
Exposes the real values, in contrast to the ones hung on the wall - Do you have ongoing 1:1 meetings? How do you drive a 1:1 meeting?
Shows management style and care for personal growth and happiness - What were a few workshops, conferences or talks that the company sponsored?
Shows whether the company invests in education - How do you mentor junior / medium / senior developers?
Demonstrates how you can grow professionally - How do you keep the team motivated?
Shows if they find it significant and what they do about it - What is the biggest technical challenge at the moment?
Learn about real problem(s) and how they are attacked - Name one thing you would change if you could, that would make you happier at work
Reveals drawbacks you should be aware of - How and from whom do developers receive feedback on their work and behavior?
Glimpse at the company culture and work process - Give example of developers influencing a product decision
Tells how involved the developer are
The questions should be about things that you really care about. Adapt them to your needs.
If this sounds far-fetched, note that a candidate just interviewed me and posed similar questions. It was his condition to start the recruiting process with him, and I gladly cooperated.
Try it out the next time you get approached by a recruiter.
Write me how it went.
