If you have a remote position open, your challenge is not attracting the correct candidate, it’s filtering out the bad ones, because you’ll have hundreds or thousands of them.
This my favorite technique:
Add a programming knockout question to the application process that is so simple to solve that only* unqualified developers will not do it manually.
Here’s the question:
result = 0 for x in [3,3,5]: if x >= 3: result = result - x else: result = result + x
What is result?
| 1 | 0 |
| -11 | -10 |
Reveal the answer
If you got 1, congratulations, you have wired your brain to easily interpret code.
If you got -11, you copy pasted it somewhere. The trick is that there’s a hidden equal sign in the conditional “if x > 3”
The logic of course is that for a good programmer it would be more of a hassle to copy, open an interpreter or ChatGPT, paste it, run it, then answer, than just run the code in their head.
I used a very similar question while I was CTO at MonetizeMore. Interesting things happened:
50% of candidates got the AI/Interpreter answer.
47% Answered the question correctly.
3% Answered incorrectly.
A few candidates resubmitted the application after getting the answer wrong (we didn’t tell them), one of those candidates was a great hire.
One candidate posted the incorrect question to a forum, and got an answer. So when subsequent candidates Googled the incorrect question, they got the wrong answer.
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*I should say this method is not perfect, and you’ll get false negatives, but I see it more as doubling your ability to process candidates, or reducing in half your recruitment time.
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