For founders
A hard assessment can test the wrong job.
Difficulty is a weak substitute for relevance. Decide what the candidate’s work should let you conclude.
Published
Write the conclusion before designing the test.
An assessment can be long, demanding and consistent while answering a question the job barely asks. Before adding another stage, finish this sentence: after this exercise, we should have a better reason to trust this person with a specific responsibility.
If the conclusion is only “they are smart” or “they work hard,” narrow it. Do you need to know how they investigate a customer problem, prioritize conflicting requests or notice that the assigned task will leave something unresolved? Those require different exercises.
Give them the unresolved part of the work.
The useful signal is in how the candidate handles uncertainty. Which facts do they check? What do they treat as an assumption? What would make them reject their first answer? A polished list can conceal weak reasoning; a cautious answer can conceal an inability to make a call. Ask enough to distinguish those possibilities.
Keep the exercise bounded and explain what will be assessed. Use fictional or safely prepared material. The purpose is to examine thinking relevant to the job, rather than collect unpaid solutions to an open company project.
Agree on what would change your recommendation.
Decide the dimensions before seeing the answers: diagnosis, prioritization, assumptions, follow-through. Describe strong and weak behavior in terms of the work. Leave room for a defensible approach you did not anticipate.
Keep a stage only when you can name the hiring risk it addresses, the behavior you will assess and an answer that would change your recommendation. If it supplies only another score, redesign or remove it. One interview still has limits; use other conversations and references to examine the uncertainties it leaves open.
Try this
Design a useful assessment
Use this before adding or expanding an interview stage.
- The responsibility we need to trust this hire with:
- The uncertainty this assessment should resolve:
- A small, fictional work sample that exposes it:
- The behaviors we will assess consistently:
- What result would change our recommendation, and what would still remain unknown: