Pre-interview tests...

[oscarose]

I sat one for my current contract, tbh i knew it was going to contain some trip you up type, really obscure, descibe in detail the inner workigns of SQL Server type questions that you're not really going to know unless you wrote the system.

Exactly - was it you who cost me 300 miles worth of juice?

[Spacecadet]

Not sure about that. A ringer would be busted in their 1st week so a pointless exercise.

not necessarily and that is still a week wasted and the hiring manager has to explain why he couldn't find the right person the first time.

[northernladuk]

Not sure about that. A ringer would be busted in their 1st week so a pointless exercise.

But to a client that is a week's money wasted and a two week delay to get someone in and a week to get up to the same level the first guy left. Nearly a month of delays. All that and they are still running the risk of getting another numpty in. That is an unacceptable situation so they have to try something.

[Kanye]

If I was desperate I would do it, but when I'm not I tend to turn the tests down on principle too - with the same resultant strops from agents.

My view is that there are enough roles out there without needing to speculatively spend time on tests before even getting to an interview stage.

When I've done them in the past, I've also often not heard back from the companies (despite submitting a good solution), or found that they have been that more needy than usual in terms of lots of interviews that drag on for ages before fizzling out.

I just don't think it should be in the contractor mindset to do business like this. I certainly wouldn't give my plumber a plumbing 101 test before committing to a job. I'd just fire him if he turned out not to be up to scratch.

[oscarose]

not necessarily and that is still a week wasted and the hiring manager has to explain why he couldn't find the right person the first time.

But to a client that is a week's money wasted and a two week delay to get someone in and a week to get up to the same level the first guy left. Nearly a month of delays. All that and they are still running the risk of getting another numpty in. That is an unacceptable situation so they have to try something.

A pointless exercise for the ringer I meant. I know there are some real bull tulipters out there but it would take something to go from a call centre worker to an old IT git.

I see where you're coming from though.

[oscarose]

If I was desperate I would do it, but when I'm not I tend to turn the tests down on principle too - with the same resultant strops from agents.

My view is that there are enough roles out there without needing to speculatively spend time on tests before even getting to an interview stage.

When I've done them in the past, I've also often not heard back from the companies (despite submitting a good solution), or found that they have been that more needy than usual in terms of lots of interviews that drag on for ages before fizzling out.

I just don't think it should be in the contractor mindset to do business like this. I certainly wouldn't give my plumber a plumbing 101 test before committing to a job. I'd just fire him if he turned out not to be up to scratch.

+1

[darmstadt]

I've done one test and that was nearly 30 years ago. My first proper job interview while I was working as a YOP was at a major vacuum flask manufacturer and myself and the young lady who was doing the YOP alongside of me were both urged to go for the position by the local careers office and so we went along. There followed the usual permie type questions and then came the test. I don't recall much of it but we were put in seperate rooms and from what I recall they were mainly aptitude tests such as putting the correct shaped blocks in the correct slots and matching figures to words. I passed and for some strange reason she failed! Didn't get the job mind you although I'm glad as that was working on ICL and where are they now?

Admittedly when I left school and was looking for my first job of which there were not many (this was the Thatcher era) nearly every company tested school leavers. I did tests at numerous banks which I suspect I failed catastrophically and at electronic companies which I passed but didn't want the position they offered me. I think if someone either asked me to do a test now or asked for my school qualifications I would walk out, luckily no-one has...

[bobspud]

Cap Gemini asked me to do a case study for a role the other week. As I saw it, the rate was hardly worthy of getting out of bed for and as you have said, I felt that the whole thing was a little beneath me. However I spent an hour on it and treated it as a crossword puzzle.

I knocked up a slide deck picked some data centres that I knew they owned in the general area of the fictitious client and blew the interview out the water... In the end I think they have lost the budget for the gig (good job I start my new role next week) but they were really impressed. They were used to people stuttering their way through trying to answer a few questions...

Just because a test is beneath your ability, it doesn't hurt to show the interviewer what you can do...

[bobspud]

I just don't think it should be in the contractor mindset to do business like this. I certainly wouldn't give my plumber a plumbing 101 test before committing to a job. I'd just fire him if he turned out not to be up to scratch.

Funny you should say that. I worked with a chap that said sod it I will sack them if they are crap. The poor sod had his ground floor roof collaps because the plumber was using a power flush to clean his central heating system and forgot to shut it down. It flooded the upstairs while he was on the phone to a mate...

Always pays to ask some questions...

[Gentile]

I've been talking to a 'recruitment agency' about a role and all the holes seemed to fit. She then insisted I take a standard 'database' test provided by the end client. I told her, "I don't do low-grade permie tests as these are for employees". The conversation didn't go too well afterwards. She called me very unprofessional and became very aggressive indeed and I refused my 20+ year career to be judged by an irrelevant, 'school boy' test. She ended up hanging up on me

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Don't worry about it is my advice, Oscar. I'm all for playing the game, letting my brain and not my ego into the driving seat during negotiations, and dealing with the odd bit of necessary bureaucracy to get a gig. However, there's a big difference between being flexible and bending over backwards with no co-operation or added value coming the other way.

The two times I've been asked to do a pre-engagement test were: once, for a permie post (where I was asked to an online test before they'd even interview me), and another time for a contract gig where I was asked to do the test after the interview as a final step before being offered the gig. With the permie/before-interview one I got 98% on the test, and after wasting my time that was when they decided to tell me they could only offer me £5k less than what I was already making where I was. With the contract gig, I put in a similarly-stellar performance, only to find that the contract when offered contained lots of one-sided clauses that the agency refused to negotiate on (such as they could get rid of me at any point in the three-month gig, but I couldn't give them notice). I said thankyou but no, and the poor sod that did end up taking it was only there for 6 weeks.

Bottom line, we all know these things are a waste of time, and show bad faith to boot. Agencies seem to use them for one reason: because they assume that having invested some of you're time, you're less likely to object should what they have to offer after the fact be less than desirable to you. Additionally, I've invariably found that when people use these tests, it's an indicator only that the client/agency doesn't know how to do your job themselves, but for some reason is nonetheless misguided enough to believe they are qualified to assess people that do have the skills they lack. Online multiple-choice questionnaires in particular seem to make some non-technical people feel like they're engaging in meaningful assessment, when in reality such tests are usually profoundly irrelevant to the skills that have actually been asked for (hands up, for example, if you've ever been asked to answer questions on Javascript rather than the Java test you were expecting?, or Visual Basic rather than VB.Net?). These 'tests' are frequently no more pertinent to the skill that's ostensibly meant to be under the microscope than those pseudo-psychology quizzes published in tabloid magazines that inform you what your personality is like based on whether you've answered "mostly Cs" or not.

If a ClientCo wants me to demonstrate my skills, I'm happy to do so. The best ones I've found tend to get you to sit at an actual computer loaded with all of the tools you'll have on the job and write a short piece of code that solves an abstract problem that takes no more than 20 minutes to code, then you discuss your solution and approach with one of their bobs that actually does know what she/he is talking about. The worse approaches I've seen go on a sliding scale from attempting to assess people by using whiteboards and talking to bobs that don't code, to, right at the bottom of the scale, asking someone they've never even met to fill in a meaningless online questionnaire that the ClientCo/agency doesn't even understand themselves.

I wouldn't lose any sleep over this one if I were you. It sounds like the agency revealed their true face when you called their bluff by getting angry about it, rather than just treating your position more professionally.