Having fun hiring, wrote some observations early this week. Some discussions happened on this thread at hackerstreet.in.
I made a huge mistake by giving an online test to a lot of candidates. I was selectively sending the tests to candidates whose skills were not ascertainable based on what was mentioned on the resume. I thought that it would be okay for people between 0-3 years of experience to answer them, hence, making my life easier. I was wrong. A lot of these tests were not attempted.
When I tallied a report with the resumes, I found that most of the people who had more than 1 year of experience did not want to take the test. Makes sense. Candidates who are good (and good programmers are arrogant!) would ignore the test. Others who are average, would ignore anyways!
Changing the strategy now. More skype calls and seemikecode sessions.
This has pitfalls though. I can only do a limited number of sessions and there is a good chance some good candidates would get filtered before they reach the skype bucket.
Is it okay to ask the candidate upfront if they are willing to take an online test?