[quote=flu]What one company did that I interviewed for was interesting. They made candidates take an online test. Interesting idea.[/quote]
I’ll spare you the rant, but I’d argue that the online tests are horrible at figuring out whether a candidate is qualified or not. (And they often rule out good experienced programmers since the questions are geared to recent college grads vs those with work experience) Most if not all of the questions on these tests are totally irrelevant to real programming tasks. The open ended questions you asked in the interview, “Can you give me examples of when you designed interfaces and abstract classes, what led you to chose one versus the other?” will give you much more insight into the person’s ability.
More importantly, if you can make the person feel relaxed and get them to talk about their past work experiences you will be able to get clues about whether they are productive, whether they are passionate about what they do, or whether “it’s a job man, I’m just here for the paycheck.”
So, skip the online tests and go straight to the questions that tell you who this person is, and what they know.
