Slashdot Mirror
Written Tests for Interviews?
University Tech asks: "I am a technician
at a small private university in the process of hiring a new technician. Everything here is done by committee. One of the committee members was very offended that we were giving the interviewees a written test after we had finished the oral part of the interview.
How many of you have had written tests as part of a job interview? I think I have had one at every tech job interview I have ever had (six interviews) and even two hands on tests. Most of my co-workers and friends have as well. Is this perhaps a regional thing or is this normal for us techies?"
What do you mean by techie? As a software developer I've never had a written test or hands on test, but I have had plenty of strong technical interview questions given orally where I'm expected to write code on a whiteboard, or notepad to prove I know what I'm talking about.
That said, I imagine a PC technician would probably have a hands on test to make sure they can demonstrate what they claim they can do.
If you feel you need a written exam to prove a candidates abilities then go for it. But if you think you can recognize talent without it then why not just skip the test and the stress/frustration that comes with it?
Having a written test seems like a good idea, though, since:
you can show the written test to someone else who is involved in decision making, but did not attend interview,
you lower the chance of an applicant claiming later that they weren't hired because of some prejudice,
it gives people understanding that they are tested not on how they dress, but what they know.
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I used to teach. When I was looking for my first public school contract, I applied to close to 20 school systems. EVERY one required a written essay on the application -- some typed, some handwritten. Later, when I worked in a residential treatment program, they had me sit in a room with my future supervisor and write a few paragraphs on a given topic.
As a teacher, I found that there are MANY people, children and adults who may have good verbal skills, but are completely incapable of using the written word.
Now that I'm running my own business, I would not conceive of hiring ANYONE (except a sanitation engineer) without a written test. They can be offended or not, it's their choice. If they find it demeaning, or offensive that my company requires a written test, they don't have to work for me.
I realize it is the University people, not applicants, who are shocked, but it is necessary to know how someone can express him/herself in writing. I'm sure any college/university administrators are in their own world, where their peers all have a Master's, or Ph.D., so their writing skills have been proven in a thesis. You may want to point out to them that you are not hiring someone in the circles they run in, but someone who will need good writing skills. Without testing an applicant, how will you know if this person can write well?
Another note: at the grad and post grad level, you are in an instutition that deals with a completely different type of education than someone who has had to teach people (from kids to adults) to read and write. I can tell you, from experience, there are MANY people out there who can express themsleves very well verbally, but can't write a coherent paragraph for any reason.
On the far side of this question, my firm is rather unusual, and I will be requiring many creative and technical people, all working together in a strongly interactive and interdependent atmosphere. I've even talked with my laywer about requiring job applicants to go through a ropes course (or other group building exercise) with other applicants as part of the application process. We figure it would be one of the few ways to see if a person REALLY believes in teamwork, or just claims to. It seems (and perhaps is) extreme, but I've worked with too many people that claim to be one thing (and may even believe what they say), but are really something different. We want to see what a person is like when they have to work with a group of other people to sovle a problem and cope with stress.
Perhaps you should form a sub-committee to investigate if that act is offensive. And then another sub-committee to liase with the offended person and to properly record their feelings. Then form a sub-sub-committee to assess the performance of both sub-committees.
Perhaps at that stage everyone will have forgotton why any of the committees was formed in the first place and it the whole thing will blow over.
In fact, if you are hiring a developer for example and the candidate does not have anything conrete which he has done to show to you. If the candidate is asked to program for example 3 simple (and quick) programs related to his/her future work - then both the future employy and employer have much better basis to form their opinion on. Based on my experience, people on LIKE to do these real-life tests, because it makes sense. Why would you want to start a job that you will be uncapable of doing?
I don't mean that the CONCEPT sucks, I mean the implementation usually does. Asking somone to answer trick CS questions ("Ha! Got you Mr. Expert C programmer! You completely overlooked the colon that should be a simi-colon of line 513 on the test! You are such an imposter, get out of this office!") and don't show any real skill at all. Sure the guy who aces the "test" may be a good monkey who can perform the exact same task you average IDE will do cheaper and faster, but that doesn't mean he knows how to properly walk a tree or build an object hierarchy.
If you are going to have a test, ask questions that test a person's ability to think, not a person's ability to remember esoteric factiods about a particular language. Ask open-ended questions with many possible naswers and see how he deal with them... THEN you may actually get an engineer worth the money you are paying for him.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I'm not a laywer, but luckily, some lawyers write web pages.
According to "Pre-Employment Testing of Applicants", written tests can be dangerous because "A multiple choice aptitude test may discriminate against minority applicants or female applicants because it really reflects test-taking ability rather than actual job skills."
Now there's the old thorny issue: If you give a test of type A and group P has a high tendancy to do badly on a test of type A, are you discriminating against group P?
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Personally, I feel they are ridiculous. Inevitably, you end up getting asked things like:
In SunOS 2.x, what was the command used to check how much belly lint has migrated into your power supply?
What is wrong with this piece of code? (inevitably written in your least favorite language)
In Perl, what is the function that returns the Hebrew date given the Latvian date?
I'm exaggerating a little-- but only a little.
The basis of most of these tests is simple-- rote memorization, and forcing the hapless test-taker to perform tasks with paper and pencil where they would ordinarily have 5 ORA books, a half dozen colleagues on AIM/ICQ/Yahoo! Messenger/MS Messenger to chat with, and Google.
Needless to say, this is not only unfair, but comically (tragically!) unrealistic.
Unfortunately, the only meaningful test of a programmer is the one thing they cannot do in an interview setting-- have the candidate perform a real, everyday assignment, with full access to everything they would usually have access to, without the artificial and performance-damaging stress of the test environment (remember, many of us get conditioned to stress out when in a testing environment. Remember all those horrid nail-biting Calc/Physics/Chem exams from High School and College?). But since that can't be done...
Personally, when I give interviews, my technique is to grill users on their general coding/SA philosophy, and their TRUE background-- that is, not only things they've done for corporations, but things they've done for non-profits, things they've done at home, things they've done while sitting on the john in Penn Station... It doesn't matter where you coded something to me. But unfortunately I seem to be alone with that opinion, and most employers only want to hear about things that you did in a commercial, for-profit environment.
A sad fact of the market nowadays is that a large proportion of job applicants are grossly underqualified. Most of my job, as I've explained to coworkers, is weeding out, for instance, Unix SA job applicants who've never adminned a Unix box ("But I have a certificate from Sun!")... programmer interns whose greatest programming achievement thus far is "I opened a Visual BASIC program's source code, and changed its background color"... and the like. (Both of these are actual examples pulled from my interviewing experiences. Scary.)
I personally feel the job of interviewing is easy, if you're a serious hacker yourself. Hackers can always recognize other hackers. Even though many of us lack much ability to 'sense' people (remember how many geeks are autistic, e.g. with Asperger's Syndrome or whatnot), a geek can almost always sense another geek, if they are AT ALL paying attention.
Of course, in some cases, The Boss specifically does not WANT a geek. If you are lucky, this sentiment will fizzle out before the end of the interviewing process, leaving you to select a geek for the job. But once, I recall my boss telling me she wants a "regular, ordinary" (suit-wearing) person to help SA our Unix boxes. The result was a disaster. We interviewed a number of of really well-presented, suit-clad, well-educated, polite young (and older) men-- absolutely none of whom proved qualified to even TOUCH a live Web site, let alone one of our size.
After sitting in on an interview, my boss admitted that I was right-- that looking good in a suit and having a few certificates from Sun does not a Unix SA make.
Anyhow, just my 2c... YMMV. Sorry for rambling.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
From my own observations, most people in this country can speak well enough to get a point across, but have difficulty writing a coherent paragraph. Ask the average man on the street a question, or ask him his opinion on a particular issue, and he'll give you a verbal response that's easy to understand. Ask him to give you a written answer instead, and I'd be willing to bet that the response would be so full of grammatical or spelling errors that it would border on incomprehensible. I'm not trying to insult anyone here, I'm just speaking from what I've seen.
There seems to be a trend in America where the focus - at least during formative education - is placed on oral communication as opposed to writing skills. Ask any recent high school graduate how many of his or her teachers took "class participation," a.k.a. answering questions orally, into consideration when computing the students' grades. You'll find that 75% is a lowball figure; nearly every teacher at the high school level (and many at the college level) place a significant amount of grading weight on verbal class participation. You'll also find that those students who don't speak out at all during class are given lower grades, on average, than those who do.
Ask the same students how many of them took a history class, a science class, a math class, or essentially any class other than English where essays were part of the curriculum. Of those who respond affirmitavely, ask whether or not the teachers in those classes took off points for incorrect spelling, grammar, coherence, or structure. You're going to wind up with a number so low that it's embarassing.
Hell, take a look at the average Slashdot post. How many posts have you read where the poster has confused "there" for "their," "its" for "it's," or "of" for "have?" How many times have you seen someone write "taken for granite" instead of "taken for granted?" How many times have you seen someone write the phrase "a whole nother issue" instead of, say, "an entirely different issue?" Now you're getting numbers so high that it's embarassing. If you aren't recognizing these blunders, either you aren't paying attention or you aren't reading much.
These trends carry into the workplace. I've received professional memos from executives which contained most of the above spelling and grammatical errors, sometimes all in one memo. Far too many people are becoming so dependent upon spelling and grammar checkers which purport to turn shitty writing into gold (cough MS WORD cough) that they never take the time to proofread their documents, much less edit them afterwards. Just click the "Auto-Correct" button and everything will be fine...
Getting back to the point, guess what? People who can't write well are intimidated by those who do, just as people who aren't athletic are typically intimidated by those who are. If my department were hiring a programmer and required the hiree to complete a physical obstacle course every week, I'd likely be afraid that the new employee would do better on that test than I could do. And that would make me fear embarassment by a junior employee. Damn right I'd object.
The moral of the story: we need to emphasize writing just as much as, if not more than, we emphasize speaking. The former is the most common method of communication used in the professional arena, and the quality of writing in the workplace is slipping rapidly.
Our rationale was that we would discuss experience during an interview, but too often during tech interviews, someone would be asked questions such as "What would you do if the system came up with error xxx?" That isn't representative of the work environment.
So, we sent a series of questions, letting the person know they had a few days to work on it and that they should use whatever resources they could. That way, we could more directly test their ability to discover the answers to the problems they would face in the job.
Surprisingly, we often would find out more about the person's personality than their technical skill. Some wouldn't reply. Others grumbled. Others sat down and really researched the questions, answering with their own experience. It seemed in some cases, people would put on a happy face when they put on a suit, but when doing "homework," you got to see their true work attitude. Overall, I thought it was an effective measure of how much they would work on a problem and what skills they had to research a problem.
I've only been given one written test, and test wasn't about my technical ability, and it was done on the east coast.
Now-a-days I think I'd come close to being offended if a company insisted upon a written test of my technical ability. I've been in technical interviews, and those are fine -- they confirm what I claim on paper. But I'm not a job hopper, I think that my steady employment coupled with my personal software development business should prove that I'm capable of working within a team and working independantly. The real question for the business is whether my technical abilities fit the need the business has and whether the cost of hiring me fits the budget they have for the position.
I guess the bottom line is that I have over twenty years in software development and systems administration in varied enviroments. I don't feel the need to do more than prove I can do a great job in the position. And that probably doesn't, for me, include a written test.
It works for me -- when I was laid off two years ago when the company essentially failed, I had a job five days later. When I took a new job three months later because of poor working conditions, my former manager was essentially willing to pay me anything to get me back -- neither the I nor the company was as willing. But in each case my salary went up quite a bit.
I guess what it boils down to is that while a written test might be okay in more entry level positions, I don't think it's appropriate for upper level positions. If it's a technical job, do a technical interview. Check references and former employers if you're unsure about the person's writing ability or his or her ability to work within a team. But for upper level posistions I do think written tests are inappropriate.
Sean.
How ironic... I have yet to hear about
someone become offended (other than the
candidate) when being subjected to humiliating
practices like drug tests (hand over your
urine, and, please, piss while we watch).
That is fine, of course. But a written test
of skill... oh the horror...
Considered harmful.