From my POV, the main thing that's really broken with interviewing right now is the filtering process, even before candidates do a take-home test.

In the last few years I was the main tech interviewer for a 300-employee fintech.

For a specific position, one recruiter got around 150 applicants, selected 5 great ones, who did take-home tests and mild-tech interviews. Offers were made to most.

For the same role/salary, but from another queue, a second recruiter got around 900 applicants, cherry-picked about around 70 of them. Out of those, only 40 completed the 1h take-home test. Only 20 delivered it, only 10 implemented the requirements. Of the 10, all were unable to answer even basic questions.

This was concurrently, so it wasn't "affected by AI".

I didn't changed my methods and in fact I didn't even got close to asking hardball questions to the second group.

The second recruiter didn't get their contract renewed and left.

The thing is the internship or code campfire or probation or whatever all need the hiree to stop doing what they were doing. It’s incredibly intrusive. Lots of the best candidates have jobs and families and aren’t going to give up their current job to try out for a company that’s not committing. The whole post is so biased to the hirer.

I don't understand how a failing stamp for a campfire is good for the interviewee. It signals that they weren't good enough to get hired. Why would they want to parade that around?

Seems a bit detached from the real world.

If I am doing a 6 month contract which is what he is proposing then yeah I want a great day rate and to earn 12 months salary in those 6.

It basically means I invest in a company that doesn't believe in me and probably wont try to help me succeed.

Also mortgages, car loans, life and health insurance etc. are harder to get on a short contract.

Hiring is broken (maybe) but 6 month paid interviews are not the solution.

The paradox that strikes me is that "hiring is broken" yet these companies are beyond successful. So there's still yet another layer of something in between observing that employees are capable / incapable, and the company successful / unsuccessful.

Most interviews are just referrals then confirming the bias, even if you fail some questions, you are likely in. If you came from no where, they are not gonna like you unless you get all the questions right.

If you want to know if someone is good at your company in 3-4 interviews, it’s tough, the best they can do is ask these technical questions. Talk to you about your past work, ask you technical what ifs. Most dumb ass companies will ask you to do trick coding leet code crap.

I don't think this works, and other comments have also pointed out the same. You open a position, you receive 200 CVs. Ok, then what, get them all to come in for a couple days work? A company that needs only one position can't possible handle that.

Now you're amazon/google. You have 200 open positions in a certain site/country. You receive 10000 CVs. Same problem, different scale.

So ok, you need to filter CVs, mmm, which sucks, right, so perhaps we do a screen interview? mmm, low signal, maybe....

I’ve seen this before. The result is a revolving door of temporary work. Because soon companies will be “you already put 6 months in, we don’t have enough signal work 6 more months” and at the year mark they swap you for a new candidate.

And before you say that this is inefficient consider that despite being terrible for morale and efficiency (proven in un’etica studies) companies still maintain the bottom 10% out or up or out policies.

Companies always love their power on their employee over efficiency.

Maybe I'm an oddball, but I've always thought this: if a cool company wants to hire me but isn't sure, give me a 3-6 month fixed contract and LFG. There's zero doubt in my mind it would work out. And if not, so what, I'll be okay.

Today I'm 45 with family and have a fancy VP title, but I would have no problem to do this for an interesting role at a cool company.

This paper (from the same research as his book on high end culinary organizations) is worth a read https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0001839214557638 - he talks about "negotiated joining" which is a similar scheme for placements that works well with undefined job roles.