Why candidate assignments are the best assessment tool

Want to increase your odds of hiring the right person? Use assignments.

👋 Hi, it’s Greg and Taylor. Welcome to our newsletter on everything you wish your CEO told you about how to get ahead.

A few weeks ago we wrote about high output generalists – how to be one and how to hire one. In that post, we recommended hiring managers use assignments in the interview process to test for these skills. It’s been one of our most controversial takes.

Our comments and inbox were full of readers pushing back on asking candidates for “free consulting work.” But assignments aren’t free consulting work. In a high-stakes process (which hiring is), they’re the only way to truly test a candidate's abilities.

If you’re not including an assignment in your hiring process, you’re lowering the quality of the hire you’ll make. Here’s why.

– Taylor

Interviewing is flawed

In any hiring process, we’re trying to evaluate two things: characteristics (can I work with this person?) and abilities (can they do the job?). The three most common parts of a hiring process are an okay proxy for characteristics. They’re a terrible proxy for abilities. 

The candidate's background – We usually start by looking at a candidate’s resume, and making assumptions about them. We ascribe characteristics based on their past company (former Uber employees ship fast, Walmart employees are great at operations) or role (consumer marketers have owned a budget, a technical project manager can run a standup). But 90% of the time, these assumptions are wrong. We lack context on the company stage, resources available, and specific scope of the role. 

Interviews – Ask ChatGPT or Google “advice for interviewing” and you’ll be told to ask behavioral questions – “give me an example of…” This is right – it’s the best way (that we’ve seen) to try to proxy for abilities in an interview. But if we’re honest, most interviews are just a characteristics assessment. Candidates can perfectly craft the examples they share, and you rarely get the context in which they accomplished the output (budget, resources, time, etc.) or their specific contribution vs. that of the broader team. 

Reference checks – You’re either asking the candidate for a reference (no one gives a bad one) or sleuthing LinkedIn to find a connection, who’s also unlikely to honestly assess their former colleagues flaws. 

We use all three steps at Section. They help evaluate a candidate’s characteristics. But our best hires have come from including an assignment in the process – one that helps us evaluate the real-time abilities of that candidate.

What makes a good assignment

Assignments proxy for abilities by allowing us to simulate the type of work a candidate will do and the constraints in which they’ll do it (imperfect information, time constraints, etc.).  

Great assignments test for 4-5 things:

1. The basics: No typos, errors in your code, etc.

2. Critical thinking: Break this into two things: obvious and non-obvious solutions. We want candidates to identify 1-2 of the “obvious” solutions or answers to the assignment that we’re expecting to see, and then at least one we hadn’t considered.

🛠️Example: We’re currently hiring a business development lead – that assignment asks candidates to identify 1-2 partner value propositions rooted in our product today, and one value proposition the candidate thinks would resonate, but isn’t based on our current product.

3. Your process – Great assignments show us how you got to your end result. We usually ask candidates to include this information as part of the assignment or in a follow-up interview.

🛠️Example: We just hired a research analyst – in that assignment we asked them to document their process, including a transcript of their conversation with AI, as part of the final output.

4. AI use – At Section, we expect candidates to use AI to pressure test and improve their assignment, because they’ll be expected to do this at Section.

5. Presentation skills (role dependent) – For some roles (especially client-facing roles), we’re also testing for a candidate’s ability to present their findings.  

The difference between free work and freelance

Great assignments are NOT designed to get a polished output that we can use. The most common pushback we get on Glassdoor from candidates we didn’t hire is that they did “free work” (the assignment) for us. This might be the case for other companies – it never is for us. Not only is it shady – it’s also impractical for two reasons:

1. Our assignments are based on projects we’ve already done. It’s impossible to evaluate an assignment if we haven’t already thought through the problem ourselves (how would we know what good looks like?). Therefore, our assignments cover challenges we’ve already solved or have a point of view on. We’re not going to use the output ourselves.

2. Candidates don’t have enough context to create usable work. Because our assignments are built around time constraints and limited resources, nothing they create for us can be used later. We know they don’t have all our context, so we don’t penalize for this, but we’d never use the work for this reason.

There is one exception – for some roles, we trial a candidate with a real work assignment, usually when we can convey a significant amount of context to the candidate quickly. It’s most common for writing roles (where we can share an outline and evaluate a draft they provide). If we think there’s a chance we’ll use the work, we pay the candidate.

For example, we recently evaluated ghostwriters, and we paid a few to write a post that could end up published. One ended up published, two did not. We paid for all three.

Assignments require work from the candidate – just like other parts of the hiring process. It’s a judgement call as to how much work is reasonable. For us, we expect a few hours of work on an assignment, and try to make that clear in the assignment description. 

Sometimes, this means you’ll do the work, and then be told a few hours later you didn’t get the next interview. It’s not ideal, but it’s also reflective of work in a startup, and we’d rather not waste your (or our) time on another call if we know the answer.

We know this means some great candidates won’t apply or will drop out. That’s okay – the tradeoff is a slightly smaller pool that’s better suited to our expectations for the role.

Our advice

Most of us only make one or two hires every year, so any hire is a high stakes decision. A great hire makes your life significantly easier. A bad or even okay hire makes your life significantly harder. Anything you can do to improve the odds on a great hire is a no brainer.

Assignments are the best way to proxy for a candidate's abilities in the reality of most work environments (imperfect information, constrained time). So use them.

As a candidate, it’s also a chance to see what a job will actually entail. So take them seriously, and use them to evaluate the company as well. 

Have a great week,

Greg & Taylor