EP27 - Take-Home Interview

I have a $1M problem I urgently need to solve.

"Why not make it a take-home interview assignment?" my intern asked.

"The person who gets to solve it would get hired to the office to build it."

I had a flash of insight. My intern is a god damn genius.

Then, we posted a job ad for a "Lead Innovation Architect."

The final interview stage was a single task: Solve our $1M problem.

Hundreds of applicants poured in. We get cumulative years of free labor.

Most of it was garbage. I ghosted all of them.

Then, a candidate from China submitted a solution. Elegant. Flawless. Brilliant.

My intern was thrilled. "Are we hiring him?"

I dont think he understand.

I dont have a problem anymore. Why would I add a new name to the payroll?

I made one call to HR. Not to extend an offer.

"Ensure none of our competitors hire this person. Ever."

I thanked my intern for his service. Then, he is unemployed.

Let's review the P&L.

A $1M problem, solved for $0.

A high-level competitor identified and preemptively neutralized.

And I saved $700 firing my intern.

Follow me for more financial advice.

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Context

You seriously believe take home assignments are there to test your qualifications as a job candidate?

Before chatGPT, some of those problems are really hard and industry specific.

The best part is after spending days working on it and submitting it, you get ghosted. You should be happy if the reason is because they didn't see your solution. ¹

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Footnotes

1. Knew someone with a business who used this exact hiring pretense to fish out market solutions. ↩