Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Tom Noser's avatar

If someone bombs the work product example or the case study… believe it!! Do not hire them! Speaking from painful experience of having a candidate bomb the case study and then hiring them anyway

Expand full comment
Sharon Chou's avatar

Appreciate the reference link! Nice meta-analysis and kudos to those r^2 :-)

My first employer took the time to make a "work sample test" as part of my interview: a 3-day data analysis and modeling project that is reflective of the kind of work I'd actually do. Since then I've tried to replicate the approach from the other side of the table, but ran into problems with time constraint and proprietary data. The next best method would be to look into candidate's online portfolios and/or presentation of past projects.

For the "general cognitive test", there are caveats re: biases with respect to the cultural context of how the test was constructed. https://theconversation.com/the-iq-test-wars-why-screening-for-intelligence-is-still-so-controversial-81428#:~:text=According%20to%20some%20researchers%2C%20the,problematic%20in%20culturally%20diverse%20settings. A more focused version could be useful to test a fresh graduate's subject-specific knowledge, making it resemble more closely to the "work sample test". There are also more debates about how much this kind of tests is useful for more experienced workers, for example, all college computer science classes teach recursion but real-life software engineering rarely needs recursion...

Expand full comment
5 more comments...

No posts