We’re a very small team with little experience in hiring but got approval for a new engineer. Basically HR will look for people through the usual channels and I think we have a reasonably good job description. Unfortunately the coding challenge (a 30h+ take home) is atrociously difficult and doesn’t really reflect what we do. On the other hand I think the false positive rate would be low. FWIW it’s a Linux application and it might be difficult to only count on experience from the CV.
Any ideas how to build a good challenge from scratch and what time constraints are reasonable?
I haven’t had to do a coding challenge like this for any position I’ve applied for. I think I’d personally find it quite offputting and impersonal even if it was a lot shorter than 30 hours.
For my current (graduate) position I had two interviews. After passing the first interview I was invited to a technical interview. There I had my interviewer give me tasks such as creating a recursive function to print out Fibonnaci numbers and to create a linked list. This felt better for me as the interviewee and I imagine this had benefits for my employer too as they could see for themselves how I worked through the tasks.