Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it
Everybody on HN always gets huffy and prima-donna-ish about the idea of a take home assignment. So I&#x27;ll try to provide a different perspective.<p>For some people, like me, at least in theory, I would love it, because it&#x27;s much easier for me to shine than when put on the spot in an interview.<p>I like to talk in an interview, but I&#x27;m no good at retrieving technical knowledge in real time.<p>Unfortunately, in real life, the one hiring process I went through that required a take-home assignment, I realized at the end, I wasted my time doing it, because ultimately it was not deciding the outcome, but a regular in person coding session was. I assume this is because you never know how clever people can be in cheating remotely, so they can&#x27;t really trust the applicant did the project.<p>Now, the way you list your steps in hiring suggests the take-home assignment (and presentation) <i>is</i> the final qualification, not the first screen. Which should be good, if it really is your intention...except...<p>I see a contradiction in your post. You want a &quot;SWE&quot;, a &quot;senior&quot;, and someone who already has a &quot;deep understanding&quot; of the underlying platform.<p>The whole point, for an applicant, of doing a take home assignment is that they can demonstrate their <i>intelligence</i> rather than knowledge or ability to think quickly on their feet. If you don&#x27;t want that sort of person, and it seems you don&#x27;t, then who do you expect to apply?<p>I&#x27;m approaching the same conclusion as other people, but I&#x27;m trying to avoid explaining it in terms of seniors being too good to do take-home assignments.<p>Plenty of people in tech hate interviewing, don&#x27;t have good networks, and some of them have a lot of experience. Maybe not with your tech, and maybe not with a SWE title though. You&#x27;d call them juniors, maybe. Or, you&#x27;d treat someone who&#x27;s never been a SWE per se like they didn&#x27;t know what a computer was.<p>Something I have never understood was why hiring seems to almost always be following a paradigm of filtering the pool of candidates for a very specific imaginary perfect hire, rather than taking the best candidate available independent of the job and figuring out how to utilize them.<p>And an afterthought: your use of &quot;rubbish&quot; suggests you are in the UK, while &quot;fully remote&quot; suggests you are seeking global candidates, and maybe your idea of a reasonable salary in the UK for a &quot;senior&quot; nullifies your willingness to hire from anywhere. Obviously there are lower wage areas, but maybe the people you are looking for are mostly in higher wage areas.<p>Also, just wondering - suppose a candidate takes much longer than 4 hrs or whatever you consider normal. Is that a problem in your mind? Are you screening for that? Are you happy hiring them as long as they don&#x27;t brag about how long it took, and do a good presentation?