Over the years I’ve been asked to do a lot of programming aptitude tests. I’ve had to do some in the last couple of months and I’m deliberately writing this now before I get the results back of the most recent one so you won’t think that this post is just sour grapes…

I’m not going to get into the details of the tests because it doesn’t really matter what they are or who administered them for the purposes of this post.

I don’t like these tests. I don’t think they work well for either the candidate or even the company that is using them.

An obvious complaint is that the tests bare little resemblance to Real Life. On Twitter I cynically suggested that a more realistic test would involve trying it write a program based on an ambiguous and constantly changing specification. The test would end when you quit in frustration.

A bigger issue, I think, is the amount of time it takes and when they take place.

Let’s tackle the latter point first. Every time I’ve been asked to take a test it has been before I’ve spoken to anyone. All they’ve seen of me is my CV/resume. All I know about the company and job is what I see on their website and a brief job description. Am I a nice person? What is it like to work there? Neither party has any idea.

My objection to this is that we both have a lot to lose if the recruitment process goes wrong. I always consider an interview to be a two way process — they need to learn about me and I need to understand more about them — yet the very first stage in the recruitment process is them demanding a couple of hours or a days commitment of my time but only a couple of minutes of their time.

To be clear, I have sat on the other side of the table. I do know that far too many candidates have no real hope of filling the position. But, equally, you don’t want to push away the most qualified candidates.

Two hours is a good a chunk of time. A day is a lot of time. If I already have a full time job and am just looking to move to something better how are those requests going to fit into my schedule? Badly I’d hazard. A full day is half my weekend. Two hours is an evening. (At least! Finding two contiguous hours at home these days is a challenge.)

Sure, the least qualified candidates will fail it but the very best candidates probably won’t even take it. They’ll just say “no” and move on to an opportunity that requires less upfront effort.

I came across this quote earlier today: “Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option” (either Mark Twain or Maya Angelou, not sure who said it first). That seems very appropriate here. Should I really prioritise these companies over others? Are these companies that special? (A possible exception would be really big names like Google or Apple but I think it’s fair to say that none of the companies that have asked me to do tests have been in that class.)

So, what’s the answer? Certainly there’s no silver bullet that pleases everyone and finds only the very best matches. Having thought about this I think the best compromise would be asking candidates to do something as basic as FizzBuzz (but probably not exactly that as it would be very easy to Google the answer).

To people who have never done any recruitment this probably sounds incredibly patronising. All I can say is that I wish that were true.

And if you really want to administer a test that takes more than thirty minutes, I think they’d be more acceptable much later in the recruitment process. Or failing that, offering to pay isn’t a ridiculous suggestion, though I suspect most employers would argue otherwise.

Afterword: After writing all this, why am I even taking the tests? Mostly because I’m currently between jobs so it’s difficult to argue that I don’t have the time.

After-afterword: I passed the test. I still don’t like them.