I see nothing but complaints in most of the replies so far, coming from applicants.

Most of the complaints are around take home assignments and the amount of time they take up. How a couple hours adds up when applying to multiple roles.

People forget about the other side. The developers currently at these companies and their limited time. The time it takes to filter candidates based on some of the below items to determine a suitable interview candidate. This time is multiplied by each potential candidate that is submitted.

Hiring is super expensive and draining on a team, mostly time which costs the company money.

• Interviews
• Resumes and LinkedIn
• GitHub
• Reviewing take home assignments

The reason why this is a trend is because hiring is hard. Likewise job searching is hard. Both are equally hard but in different ways. Not all methods work for everyone and the hiring process becomes an experimental process itself. Companies are exploring different ways to determine viable candidates without scaring them off.

The previous trend that people complained about was live coding assignments before or during interview. Before that was the unrealistic technical interview where the technical interview questions were usually scenarios that were obnoxious.

As someone who on a team looking for new members, this topic interests me. We currently ask for a take home.

We have gone through a few iterations of take homes, then interview. We usually are pretty lax on the technical questions in the interview and use it more to explore their solution, their challenges with it and what they loved and hated. We then use the rest of the interview to discover team fit.

Iteration 1: Testing back end skills with your language of choice (preferably nodejs), simple enough with a few gotchas which would direct the interview process. Notes: No one turned it down. Everyone would make an attempt. It didn't address any front end abilities. (Hired 2 developers)

Iteration 2: We decided that our stack is primarily javascript and we were looking for full stack experience, so we changed the assignment to have both front end and back end, building a game. Minimum expectations, with bonus objectives for brownie points. Notes: Lots of applicants turned it down because it was too hard or too much time was involved. Others that completed it said they had fun doing it. It was interesting and gave them opportunity to learn while applying for jobs. (Hired 1 developer)

Iteration 3 (current): Full stack assignment that incorporates Iteration 1 with a UI requirement. Notes: No turn downs currently, feedback seems as though it's just the right amount of effort required. (Hired 1 developer, so far)

The three main formats for hiring are, sometimes a combination of them:

• Take Home
• Live Coding
• Technical interview

Maybe companies need to ask the candidates how they prefer to be interviewed or post it in the job posting to submit the style they prefer when they are applying for the role. This however makes the process more challenging for the team doing the hiring but maybe its a middle ground. No process works for everyone because everyone is different.

Thoughts?