Many companies use personality tests in their hiring process. It makes sense when you think about it: It’s a scientific approach to find the right person for the job. Suppose you need to hire someone who works well in a team. In that case, a personality test that analyzes their psychological profile could… Read the full article

  Whiteboard interviews have long been a staple in tech hiring. And they’ve been a terrible mistake the entire time. Programmers hate them. They want them to stop. Even some interviewers hate them, but not nearly enough because they’re still a widely used interview technique. Why Are Whiteboard Interviews so Terrible? A recent study by… Read the full article

  When hiring, we lack all the information needed to make the best decision. We want to know which candidate would be best for the job, but this is impossible to know for sure (unless we hire all of them and see how they work), so we need to rely on proxies to fill in… Read the full article

Some users ask why so many candidates fail job screening tests. It’s normal for most candidates to fail; in fact —that’s the point. Unlike school tests, which are designed so that 90% of students will pass, pre-employment tests usually eliminate 90% of candidates. This is especially true when it comes to programming, where many people… Read the full article

When is the best time to give job candidates to a skill test? Did you even know that there was a best time? Because there is. The order in which you screen and interview candidates is vital to selecting the best candidates. Plus, it can save time for both you and the candidates. We’ve mentioned… Read the full article

Do you have trouble coming up with questions for a job screening test? Are you sure you are even asking the right questions? In our last post, we explained how to create a good screening test. Now let’s zoom into the question level. Depending on which skill level you’re testing for, your questions should fit… Read the full article

The average corporate job posting attracts 250 candidates. How do you quickly figure out who to interview? The traditional method is to eliminate most candidates based on their resume. This is a bad idea. Most people don’t know how to write a good resume, even if they do have the relevant knowledge and experience required… Read the full article

Our customers often ask if we allow candidates to use Google (or other resources) while taking a test. The reason they ask is because they want to prevent candidates from cheating. But, disallowing the use of online resources is not a good way to do that. There are cheating protection methods that don’t restrict candidates… Read the full article

Screening programmers is different than screening other employees, and we learned that the hard way. First, you will almost always want to hire an already good programmer. Why not hire an average one and then train them up? Years of experience and training don’t guarantee that somebody will become a great programmer. The large majority… Read the full article

TLDR: Data from two small software vendors shows that conversion rates for direct software sales differ between countries by two orders of magnitude. For each thousand new website visitors, the top group of countries had 9.14 paying customers, while the bottom group had only 0.19 paying customers. Both companies used in this research share some… Read the full article