The Problem: Curriculum Vitae
The usual way to recruit someone is to ask for a curriculum vitae and motivation letter. If you have been on the interviewer side like me you will realise that there are many candidates who only upload the same curriculum vitae and motivation letter as well, perhaps with a few changes.
This should be considered as spam really. In small teams where there is only one person interviewing, for example in a small company where it could the manager or team leader looking at the CVs in his/her spare time, it could become really challenging to go through all the CVs and decreases the bandwidth of time that be spent on real and deserving candidates.
Instead of just asking for a CV and motivation (and additional links for software related positions: like github link or website with portfolio) the job boards (may be) or the career page of the company’s website should have an additional layer of filter.
First Layer: Technical Question Multiple Choice
The first layer should something that can be easily automated and prune some of the unqualified candidates. This can be done with a multiple choice questionnaire with a time limit either for every answer of for the entire questionnaire. This forces the candidates to really possess the basic knowledge to apply to the job.
Ideally the questions should also be randomised every time the test is taken.
Second Layer: Question With Use Cases
Most people lie in their CVs and motivation letters. We need to make sure that they actually have the advertised skills. In this layer we should ask use cases and complicated questions related to the work that they will carry. For example if they are going to work as a Data Engineer then may be ask how they will architect around data pipelines, data collection and data processing to provide real past examples.
This also filters out people who are just spamming, for example “Easy Apply” on LinkedIn.
This step cannot be automated and should probably be timed but will at least give you a better idea of the candidate.
Actually we can almost entirely eliminate the use of CVs and Motivation letters with this step.
If you have heard of https://www.beapplied.com/ this is actually what they can do for you.
