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Appropriate Interviewing For a Worldwide Search?
jellomizer writes 'I am a manager of a small Software Development department, looking to hire some more developers. By edict of the CEO, the search must be made globally, so we are dealing with different cultures and different ideas of truth and embellishment, etc. To try to counteract this, we give the potential employees tests where I watch what they do, to see if they actually know what they say they know. However, it seems a lot of applicants drop out when I mention that this test is mandatory. Is this a sign that we caught them in a lie, or are we weeding out good people where we shouldn't be? Would you be willing to take a test as part of an interview? If so, is there any type of heads up you would like to know beforehand to make the decision of whether to take the test easier?' What other difficulties have people seen while trying to hire from many different cultures?
The business owner was looking for a new receptionist, and couldn't decide which of they applicants to hire, so he decided to do a test. He accidentally "dropped" a $100 bill in front of each of them. The first just handed the money back to him. The second took the money, then came back later saying "I invested that $100 you dropped in oil futures. Here's your $100, plus $50 profit." The last slyly pocketed the money and didn't say anything about it.
Which one did he hire?
The one with the biggest tits, of course!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
No, I wouldn't be willing to take a test, and I actually flat walked out on an interview in 2003 when I showed up and was told - by surprised - that I was going to be taking an exam. I was also then informed that the open position was for a junior position. When I expressed surprise at this, the HR flack's response was "Oh, didn't I mention that in my email?" She hadn't. Either of those would be sufficient for me to end the interview process, which I did.
Why would I refuse to take a test? Simple: if you're giving me a test, the usual reason is that I'm being interviewed by someone who does not possess the ability to discern whether I know what I'm doing/talking about or not. If that person is the hiring manager, then I certainly don't want to work there. Working for people who cannot identify competence or incompetence is not pleasant. If that person is not the hiring manager, I still don't want to work there: it shows they would waste my time by having me interview with such a person rather than with the hiring manager or any other person who can tell if I'm competent or not.
In our company, we work with offshore programmers.
Our selection process includes a mandatory test, during which we assess the candidate on several points, mostly: IT Skills, ability to understand requirements, motivation. In order to avoid cultural issues, we tend to focus on facts and we try to avoid questions which may lead to a culturally biased answer. For instance, we would ask: "please explain me how you will implement such feature" instead of "did you understand what I mean".
The test is a simple project, and the candidate can work on it at his/her own pace. They are followed by a project manager as in a real work environment. Its duration is normally one week as candidates usually have a day job. We renumerate the candidates for the test they take with us.
The recruitment process has been found to be effective in most cases, allowing to effectively select quality programmers. We found that there are enough programmers ready to go through our selection process for us not to worry about the one refusing to take a test.
I'm starting to think that our interviews here should literally be: give them a day's work and see how they do.
At my current job (Which required relocating out of state), I was basically given something like this. After the initial round of phone interviews, I signed an NDA, and was given a design specification for part of the product that I would be working on. I was told to ask whatever I needed clarification with, and to keep track of my hours so they could pay me when I was finished, regardless of whether I was hired or not. After I thought I was done, I submitted my project. They had a few revisions that they wanted, so they sent it back to me to see what I did with it, and presumably see how I handled needing to make changes.
Once they approved my work, I was flown on-site for the final interviews. During those, they asked about my project, why I had done things certain ways, and different ways that I had considered completing it. The project took me about 25 hours of work to complete. The day after the interview, I was offered the position.
In the end, the project that I had worked on was incorporated into the software that we released. From what I've heard, all new-hires go through this process, all with a different project to complete. It seems to work well for the company, we've got a very high retention rate.
I worked with a guy who had interviewed with Creative (the cound card guys). He came in for the interview and they gave him a sampel of code from one fo their drivers, and asked him to spot the problem. He asked for one of the linked libraries, and they had an engineer come in and bring it up for him. It was about this time that he realized he must be looking at production code.
He spent another hour debugging the problem then turned to his interviewer and said "I figured out what the problem was, but if you want to know, this will be my first day." They hired him on the spot and payed him eight hours for the interview.
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