5 Reasons To Kill The “Take Home” Interview Assignment

A “take home” is when you give candidates a sample business or technical assignment that they perform on their own time. In the past decade, we have seen a huge increase in these take-homes in interviewing processes. Companies tend to do this to cut down interviewing time or to screen out obviously bad candidates. We believe, however, that these companies are shooting themselves in the foot. Why?

1. They skew your funnel towards weaker candidates.

High-performing passive candidates have a demanding day job. They will often drop out of the process at this step, particularly if the exercise is long, or requested early in the process.

2. They are impersonal.

Nobody wants to feel like a “brain in a box.” Take-homes are a missed opportunity to build a real connection with a candidate—the kind of connection your competitors are building with them!

3. They can be gamed.

Your lower-performing, more desperate “active” candidates can get help from experienced friends. Some vendors try to side-step this through facial screening, tab-tracking or recordings, which is creepy.

4. There's no real-time interaction.

Part of the magic of a well-conducted, live problem-solving interview is the ability to observe the candidate’s thinking process. This goes away when you only see the outputs.

5. They tend to make it on the web.

While this is a risk with any problem-solving interview, it happens less often when the problem is presented by a real person vs. when it’s being digitally blasted to legions of candidates.

To be clear, we are fans of well-constructed, interactive problem-solving interviews. They can be a great way to identify exceptional candidates and showcase the intriguing problems they will encounter on the job. But do them live!

If you are still holding on to them, it’s probably because of interview fatigue—too many interviews with bad candidates. You can save far more time through intelligent, network-driven sourcing—skewing your mix to high-performing passive candidates from the very start!