Since I have been in a position to do so, I tried to push for coding challenges, and base tech IV on the assignment itself. Your blog post about hiring has been my biggest inspiration on doing hiring. I hired 10+ people in 1.5 years this way, and I would rehire 90+% of them for most roles. I do see difficulties about practicing it though:
1. When you don't control all the HR process, you can't guarantee that the tech assignment is the main filter.
2. Because resume are generally so useless, if you look for a lot of people, you need to be able to review assignments very quickly. Also, to convince people to do the assignment, I make sure to have a phone call before the assignment, which is time consuming since there is no filter.
3. Writing good assignments is hard. You want something that does not take much time (half a day max), is quick to review, interesting enough for the candidate.
I have also not been able to make sure the assignment is the sole filter. I still filter at the (single, < 90 mins) tech IV. But that is at least partially because of my domain (ML engineering), where profiles are more diverse than pure software engineering.
Comments
Since I have been in a position to do so, I tried to push for coding challenges, and base tech IV on the assignment itself. Your blog post about hiring has been my biggest inspiration on doing hiring. I hired 10+ people in 1.5 years this way, and I would rehire 90+% of them for most roles. I do see difficulties about practicing it though:
1. When you don't control all the HR process, you can't guarantee that the tech assignment is the main filter.
2. Because resume are generally so useless, if you look for a lot of people, you need to be able to review assignments very quickly. Also, to convince people to do the assignment, I make sure to have a phone call before the assignment, which is time consuming since there is no filter.
3. Writing good assignments is hard. You want something that does not take much time (half a day max), is quick to review, interesting enough for the candidate.
I have also not been able to make sure the assignment is the sole filter. I still filter at the (single, < 90 mins) tech IV. But that is at least partially because of my domain (ML engineering), where profiles are more diverse than pure software engineering.
We did a company based on this approach, and problem (1) is the main reason it failed.