When hiring for a new developer its extremely common to ask them to demonstrate their technical ability. Often this is a practical test to be done at home and then sent into the hiring manager.

It’s a nice idea, you get to see the candidate’s unhurried work, get a feel for their skills and potentially ask about them in a face to face interview later. It’s far harder for a bad developer to write good code than it is for them to learn a few answers about relational databases or solid principles.

However, I believe this approach is flawed!

To explain why I want to describe the recent experience of a friend of mine, an outstanding developer who recently applied for a development role. The technical test was presented to him and he completed it, he’d had a rather manic week and so determined not to miss his deadline so he worked late I tot he night. He confessed to me later that he probably spent somewhere between ten and twelve hours on that piece of work!

What happened?

The company rejected him with a series of bullet points over design choices without ever giving him the chance to explain why he’d made those decisions.

So let me ask you this, do you think friend is ever going to waste his time with one of their roles in the future? Do you think I, knowing his experience would apply for one of their jobs? What about the rest of our friendship group?

My point is this – any hiring manager will tell you how scarce good development resource is. By demanding eight, ten, maybe even twelve hours of our candidates’ time and then throwing it away, that’s (in my view) arrogance.

What’s more it doesn’t actually tell you very much! Sat at home what’s to stop someone googling the question, posting something on Stack Overflow, or asking a friend to complete the test for them? How do you know that the candidate’s work is their own?

So what do I recommend instead?

I’m hoping to start recruiting over the next week months and I intend to send code review tasks out to my candidates. Why?

• Asking someone to review your code gives them a chance to suggest improvements and identify where you’ve not used best practices
• Code reviews ask candidates to explain and articulate their views, something a straightforward programming challenge doesn’t
• You still get the same feel of a candidate’s focus (do they focus on code clarity, performance or UI aspects?)
• You are demanding far less of a candidate’s time and therefore aren’t putting off people applying for the role

Will my approach work? I don’t know, we’ll find out! What are your experiences with practical coding challenges? Do they work?