take home assignment interview

Why Take-Home Assignments are the Biggest Mistake for Hiring Managers

There’s no “right” way to hire.

Some companies are comfortable having a 30-minute conversation and pulling the trigger, while others might want a couple of steps and additional interviewers involved in the process to ensure they’re getting multiple opinions on who to hire. 

And while some employers make it a point to stay on top of the latest industry trends like the ones found in our 2023 Salary Guide , others fall short and — time and time again — make the same mistakes.

Why the take-home assignment interview is a big mistake

Different interview processes work for different companies. But there is one interview mistake I’ve seen across various industries — for both contract and full-time hires — that creates a major bottleneck in the interview process, and that is the take-home assignment .

Take-home assignments can be called something different depending on what the role is.

• For a marketing position, it might be a case study .
• For a software development position, it might be a coding test .
• For a client-facing role, it might be a presentation .

Regardless of the name, the outcome is often the same: candidates you were excited about drop out of the interview process, and you find yourself back at square one again and again. 

From my experience in staffing, I strongly advise my clients against incorporating a take-home assignment into their interview process. 

Why You Shouldn’t Assign a Take-Home Assignment

No one likes to do take-home assignments for free..

When asking candidates to do an assignment during the interview process, it’s often the work that they will be doing once they get hired, so it’s essentially asking them to work for free.

For candidates, time is money, and it’s time that can be spent working for their clients who are paying them. 

This interview mistake doesn’t respect people’s personal time.

Imagine you’re working 9-5 and looking for a new job. You also have two kids who need to be picked up from school, fed, bathed, and put to bed every night.

You are so overloaded in your job that you sometimes have to work after hours. When would you have the time to also fit in doing an assignment that can take anywhere from 2-10 hours?

Candidates often cannot prioritize doing additional work because it will take time away from something else they need to get done. The longer it will take a candidate to find the time to complete the take-home assignment, the more likely their interest in the job opportunity will wane. 

Other companies aren’t making this interview mistake.

As much as you want to vet candidates for the right skill level, it’s important to be competitive with how other companies are hiring, so you don’t lose out on top talent.

Creatives often get hired based on their portfolios—without an interview. Developers get hired off of a single Zoom interview.

Higher-level roles get hired after multiple rounds of interviews, which function as conversations with various stakeholders at a company, without being asked to do homework for an interview other than preparing.

If you ask a candidate to do an assignment before engaging them in the next step of an interview process, they might say they are happy to do it, but the truth is they will usually wait to start it until completing any other interviews they have lined up in hopes of getting a decision from another employer sooner.

This interview mistake fails to filter out people who aren’t serious about the role.

Many companies think these assignments will show how much a candidate wants to work at their company.

I strongly caution against this logic. The post-COVID job market is more competitive than ever, as companies with once-traditional mindsets around employees working onsite have adapted to now offer fully remote roles.

This means that candidates now have access to nationwide job opportunities and are getting job offers faster than ever before.

If seeing how serious someone is about a role at your specific company is important to you, gauging how much they researched the company before the interview is a great way to find that out.

Hiring Managers Should Avoid the Take-Home Assignment

Making the common interview mistake of requiring a take-home assignment most often results in the assignment not getting completed and the candidate pursuing a different employment opportunity that doesn’t require an additional assignment. 

It’s understandable that a hiring manager would want to test a person’s skill before offering them a job. The good news is that there are ways to do this that don’t involve asking a candidate to do extra work.

Ways to Avoid Making this Interview Mistake

Ask to see sample work from potential candidates..

Copywriters and designers have portfolios, developers have GitHubs, and high-level individuals can often pull sample proposals and plans they’ve put together in the past to exhibit their work.

If you have questions about how much they did themselves, what went into the decisions they made, or other related questions, the interview is the perfect place to dive in and find out. 

Ask your job candidate to do a test in real-time on the interview.

Some hiring managers prefer not to do this because candidates might feel “put on the spot” and not perform their best.

However, I can’t think of a single employer I have worked with who didn’t care equally about the candidate getting to the right answer, as they did about how they got to the right answer and what that showed about their thought process.

Doing a test or exercise together, and being able to speak with the candidate during it, is a great way to understand their logic.

Ask your job candidate scenario-based questions.

If you have a concern about how a candidate would handle a situation—whether it’s technical, about communication, or how they work with a team—ask specific, pointed questions to find out your answers. 

Requesting references is a great way to avoid this interview mistake.

It is completely acceptable to extend an offer pending reference checks so you’re able to get background information from someone who worked with this person before and can vouch for the candidate’s expertise.

Find great talent when you partner with Mondo

Looking to hire? Contact us to get started:

The Final Word On Take-Home Assignments for Hiring Managers

Hiring is a gamble. It’s normal to have a degree of trepidation about extending an offer to someone without a guarantee that they’ll be able to perform at the level you expect. But the best way to see if someone can do the job is to trust your gut and give them the chance to prove you right. 

Mondo Matches Great Talent With Great Companies

With an expansive, connected network of the top IT, Tech, Creative, and Digital Marketing professionals and a proprietary process,  Mondo  can match you with the hard-to-find, specialized talent you need.

• Contact Mondo today for all your hiring needs
• Download our 2023 Salary Guide  for detailed salary breakdowns for roles & jobs across the technology, creative & digital marketing industries

2024 Salary Guide: Tech, Creative & Digital Marketing

By Sarah Magazzo

Digital Marketing Manager for Mondo National Staffing Agency | AI Drafted & Human Crafted

Related Posts

4 Ways Voice Assistants Can Benefit Your Business: Siri, Alexa, Google

Complete a Year-End Career Assessment With These 10 Questions

Top 10 In-Demand Tech Roles for 2025 and Their Salaries

Never miss an insight, subscribe to our blog, a unique approach to staffing that works.

Redefining the way clients find talent and candidates find work. 

We are technologists with the nuanced expertise to do tech, digital marketing, & creative staffing differently. We ignite our passion through our focus on our people and process. Which is the foundation of our collaborative approach that drives meaningful impact in the shortest amount of time.

Staffing tomorrow’s talent today.

• Skills Intelligence Cloud
• Talent Acquisition
• Talent Management
• Campus Recruitment
• World Largest Skill Library
• English Communication Assessment
• Skills Intelligence Blogs
• Skills Taxonomy
• Skill Mapping
• Skills Intelligence: Hiring Metric
• Tech Skills Transformation Report
• JD Templates
• HR Glossary

Build Winning Teams with iMocha

Maximizing hiring outcomes with take home assignment interview, company news, diversity & inclusion, imocha engineering product updates remote hiring skills assessment.

• Tech Recruitment (230)
• Skills Assessment (172)
• Remote Hiring (117)
• L&D (62)
• Company News (53)
• Product Updates (33)
• Skills gap analysis (23)
• Diversity & Inclusion (19)

Owing to the ever-changing work environment, skill assessment platforms have rightfully gained popularity.

The reason being?

Many companies have expressed discontent with hiring a bad employee due to their inability to identify the right candidate.

HR leaders began leveraging skill assessment tools to make more objective and fair methods to make hiring decisions. These tools help recruiters and hiring managers to assess an applicant's ability to execute specific skills or skill sets, providing an unbiased evaluation of potential candidates.

Undoubtedly, skills assessments have been proven to be three times more effective than relying on gut instinct when assessing CVs. Despite this, some hiring managers have expressed concern that these assessments might confine them to identifying candidates' theoretical knowledge rather than their practical skills.

If you are one of those recruiters, then make use of take home assignments in your hiring process.

Take Home Assignments are one of the most effective ways for hiring managers to find out how candidates tackle different problems that they will most likely face on the job.

Let's take a deep dive and learn what a take home assignment interview is, what it entails, and how hiring managers could utilize it.

Let's get started!

So, what is a Take Home Assignment Interview?

Take home assignment interview, as the name suggests, are interview questions designed to assess the job readiness of candidates with the help of real-world scenarios.

Take home project interview questions are not standardized questions you can use to assess people from different backgrounds. Contrary to that, these interview assignments are specifically crafted to evaluate the skills and abilities required to succeed for which you intend to hire.

Instead of asking applicants to respond to questions on the spot, this form of interview assignment offers flexibility to candidates. It allows applicants to think critically and formulate logical solutions to the problem.

Recruiters introduce this interview question after the initial screening process to gauge a candidate's technical knowledge.

These types of questions generally contain the following:

• A detailed description of the task
• Instructions for candidates
• Guidelines that need to be followed
• Submission data

What is the goal of the take home project interview?

The goal of take home project interviews is to provide candidates with more time and flexibility to think, as opposed to being constrained by a set number of minutes. It helps the hiring team identify candidates who can formulate exceptional work and better meet the organization's needs.

In other words, the goal of the take home project interview is to:

• Evaluate the candidate's skills in-depth
• Simulate professional developer's flow
• Hire project-based candidates
• Better replication of the on-the-job experience

Take home coding assignments differ from other technical assessments because they allow candidates to showcase their abilities in a more realistic setting. Its main objective is to understand how a candidate solves problems, approaches challenges, and works in general.

Many skill assessment platforms available in the market, such as iMocha , allow you and your candidates to code freely and naturally – with the features you expect to have in your IDE.

What are the benefits of take home interview assignments?

Take home interview assignments come with a variety of benefits for companies as well as candidates.

For organizations

• It allows you to see the qualities of a candidate that would be difficult to investigate in standard interviews.
• It enables you to assess how applicants handle unfamiliar problems and their strategy for solving them.
• It lets you quickly move quality candidates through the hiring funnel and avoid developer/interviewer burnout.
• It allows you to assess applicants' algorithm-building abilities.
• Utilizing this tool, you can set deadline-based take home assessments.
• It assists you in evaluating applicants based on their hands-on project management skills that go beyond textbook knowledge, algorithms, and syntax.
• It simulates real-world scenarios to assess potential recruits for practical abilities and promptly onboard project-ready individuals without additional training.

For candidates

• Take home technical assessments give applicants an idea of what technology the company might be utilizing at their potential workplace.
• It allows applicants to showcase more skills than responding to interview questions, such as writing, presenting, critical thinking, etc.
• It enables candidates to hone their research abilities and expand their knowledge of applied topics beyond facts and memorization.

How to include take home technical assessment in the recruitment process?

Before moving on, let's assume you have shortlisted a few software engineer candidates. You are planning to assess their hands-on experience and suitability for the desired role.

You crafted an in-depth take home coding assessment with clear objectives and steps that you expect candidates to complete. However, it is possible that some applicants might feel overwhelmed and choose to withdraw from the hiring process.

The likelihood of that event happening is steep. It has often been observed that candidates tend to remove themselves from the recruitment process if they feel the assignment parameters are unclear or consider it too burdensome due to the overwhelming amount of work required.

To help you avoid this, iMocha offers project-based assessment functionality.

iMocha is a skill assessment software trusted by more than 500 fortunate companies that help enterprises make skill-intelligent decisions to obtain job-fit talent faster. It provides powerful tools for coding interviews , technical recruiting, university recruitment, lateral hiring, and diversity hiring , helping organizations improve the quality of their hires.

iMocha's Project-Based Assessments provide an extensive list of simulators to help evaluate a job candidate's aptitude for the desired role.

That means no time is wasted on manual evaluation, and you can get detailed reports on candidates' skills, competencies, and weaknesses with the click of a button.

Also watch: iMocha projects video on Simulated Assessments on Real-World Scenarios .

These test cases provide a reliable framework for assessing each candidate's qualifications, allowing for a fair and impartial evaluation process. It ensures that everyone who applies for a job has an equal opportunity to demonstrate their ability to meet the required criteria.

• Compare each candidate with a standard baseline.
• Allow applicants to learn more about the desired solution.
• Evaluate each prospect thoroughly.

Tips For Creating Candidate Friendly Take Home Assignments

To create candidate friendly take home assignments, keep four crucial tips in mind.

• Utilize a variety of tasks: Include a wide range of tasks in your take home assignments to keep candidates involved and motivated.
• Set clear deadlines: Give your applicants a set amount of time to finish the project. It will help them stay on track and complete the project on time.
• Provide clear instructions: Ensure that the assignment instructions are clear and concise, so prospects understand what is expected of them.
• Customize the assessment based on the job role: Make sure your project assessments are narrowed down to effectively evaluate the relevant skill set of employees and competencies in the specific role.

What factors should a hiring manager consider for a take home project interview?

Listed below are some essential factors to consider as a hiring manager for take home assignment interview:

• Quality over perfectionism: Take home assignments are an excellent way for the company to determine how candidates would address a real-world business problem. Still, expecting even the most qualified candidates to present a solution they could effectively implement would be unreasonable.
• Time management: Rather than focusing solely on the candidate's technical abilities, take advantage of this opportunity to evaluate how long it took the applicant to complete the assessment, ensuring that they could manage their time effectively and complete the task within the time frame specified.
• Ability to follow instructions: You can also use it to assess an applicant's ability to follow instructions, ensuring that they understand the assignment's criteria and can finish the task as outlined.
• Attention to detail: Pay close attention to the assignment details and ensure their code is properly formulated.

Ankita Kharwal

Understanding talent analytics is vital for your organization's growth. stay ahead of the curve with imocha's insights., subscribe to our blog, related posts, top 8 high volume hiring strategies to attract quality talent.

What is the secret behind companies successfully recruiting in large numbers? Many industries face this challenge, especially when filling numerous positions quickly. This could be due to forming a new team, assembling skilled freelancers for a one-off project, or restructuring the entire organization after a merger or acquisition.

• Aaditya Mandloi
• 18 min read
• 11/20/24 12:43 PM

10 Best Plum Competitors & Alternatives

In the evolving field of talent management, Plum has established itself as an active player with its solutions to change how organizations and individuals see themselves professionally. Its two primary platforms - PlumThrive and PlumFlourish, serve different but related purposes. PlumThrive enables businesses to use scientific-based data driven analytics to enhance hiring accuracy and increase talent retention. PlumFlourish focuses on individuals, helping them align their skills with career opportunities to maximize their potential.

• 25 min read
• 11/19/24 7:25 PM

Top 8 Talent Acquisition Metrics to Track

The job market is influenced by rapid technological advancements, workforce diversity, and the need for businesses to adapt. These dynamics necessitate the implementation of accurate strategies for sourcing top talent.

• 15 min read
• 11/19/24 2:30 PM

Skills Intelligence

Skills Intelligence Blogs Employee Skill Gap Analysis Employee Internal Mobility Strategic Workforce Planning Skills Intelligence: Hiring Metric Tech Skills Transformation Report

JD Templates HR Glossary Skill Mapping Webinars Guides Talent Assessment Blogs

Skills Intelligence Cloud Talent Acquisition Talent Management World Largest Skill Library English Communication Assessment Assessment Innovation

About us Customers Integrations Newsroom GDPR Contact us