Use Project-based Interviews Instead of “GitHub”

First, some background: I highly recommend that you read the following two blog posts: by Ashe Dryden: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community and by James Coglan: Why Github is not your CV. They make some fantastic points and communicate the issues surrounding “Using Github as your CV”.

Both of these were largely provoked by this tweet by Chris Anderson:

I had a similar, extremely popular, tweet from 2011:

I wanted to take this chance to clarify my position on using Github during the interview process a bit.

To start, the position being posited by Chris is absolutely wrong. No one should ever require a Github profile in favor of a resume (unless you’re applying for a job at Github, perhaps?). Nor should anyone prefer candidates who provide a Github profile over those who don’t.

(And to clarify, some people seem to be getting caught up in the terminology – I see many people using ‘Github’ as a placeholder for ‘any OSS activity’, I hope no one is being that literal.)

When you’re applying for a job it’s generally advised that the more high-quality information that you provide, the better. Anything that emphasizes your work habits, the quality of work that you will perform, and your interests is ideal. Thus the more targeted information you’re able to provide, the better. Github can provide this for some but almost certainly can’t be the final arbiter of this information for all.

We’ve had dev applicants at Khan Academy who’ve applied with traditional resumes, resume + Github profile, resume + personal web site, resume + links to projects they’ve worked on, resume + a custom project made special for the interview.

Out of all of these submissions the ones that’ve had the most impact are the ones where the candidates have gone above-and-beyond and done some custom coding, made a custom web site, or contributed to one of our Open Source projects as part of the application process. A popular project is one where candidates make a custom exercise using our exercise framework.

There are a few reasons why this particular approach is so effective:

  1. It communicates just how interested the candidate is in the job: That they’re willing to go above-and-beyond to demonstrate their interest.
  2. They show that the sort of things they’re interested in working on are largely aligned with what we’re trying to do (especially if they make an exercise with our exercise framework).
  3. If it’s a coding project you can get a sense for what their code quality is like and how they wish to portray themselves.

Naturally this isn’t completely ideal as it requires a candidate to put in considerably more time into their application than just generating a single-sheet resume. That being said the level of information that is conveyed is so much higher that it almost isn’t comparable.

The traditional interview process is broken. It’s high-stress and a poor representation of what you’ll actually experience working for the employer, or working with the candidate.

Over this past summer I developed a new “take-home” project-based interview for JavaScript-centric candidates to Khan Academy. I wanted a way to try to better-quantify a person’s development ability without having to necessarily suss out their best code from Github, or elsewhere.

I extracted a tangible, contained, project that I had assigned to one of my interns and turned it into a project. Thus far it’s worked extremely well as, as can be attested to by Pamela Fox (who completed the project with flying colors). I’m very pleased with this approach as it gets all the benefit of the candidate creating a custom project on their own but it has the added benefit of communicating to the candidate the exact type of projects that they’ll be working on here at Khan Academy.

I’d love to open up the project at some point to show how it’s done but it’s still an effective tool in our interviewing toolbox and I’m not sure I want to lose that just yet!

However, you can be privy to the project-based interview process if you wish to apply to Khan Academy! Specifically if you’re interested in working with Pamela Fox and me to build Khan Academy’s Computer Science platform (more details on the launch, a technical talk I gave on it after launch).

If this really excites you then you should apply for a Software Developer position at Khan Academy and specifically request to go through the JavaScript project interview with myself. I’ll give you the project to work on and we’ll discuss the results extensively.

The biggest drawback to this approach is that we’re demanding some of your free time to gather this information. We’re not sure what the best way is to offset this, as of yet. However by doing the project you’ll likely be able to skip a number of stages in our interview process and hopefully get started on changing the world with us at Khan Academy all the sooner.

Posted: November 21st, 2013


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