Are take-home assignments, especially company-specific ones, a fair and useful hiring tool?

Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

Product hiring take-home cases should be about adjacent problems the company would never actually pursue rather than real roadmap work

It avoids effectively stealing candidates' work while still being relevant enough that they start thinking about the company's space and often get excited about the problem

Scope: describes Ramp's own case design

44:48 20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp

Phil Carter · Sep 20, 2024

Take-home assignments in growth hiring should be scoped to one or two hours and built around a hypothetical scenario or a ubiquitous company rather than your own product

Assignments about your own company bias results toward candidates who already know the product, and open-ended assignments bias toward candidates with the most free time rather than the most ability

Scope: applies to early-stage companies especially; matters more when candidates have families or full-time roles

12:50 20Growth: The 7 Core Levers to Win at Consumer Subscription: Growth Loops, CAC + LTV Benchmarks, Pricing, Packaging, Notifications, Discounts, Paywalls | The Breakdown with Phil Carter

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

Company-specific take-homes are fair despite the asymmetric-knowledge objection, as long as they are hypothetical launches rather than problems you've already solved

The hypothetical framing means nobody has the answer, and it reveals what it's like to brainstorm with the person and how quickly they'd ramp up and fit in

Scope: concedes the asymmetric-information critique is a fair argument

48:15 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

Matteo Franceschetti · Nov 20, 2023

Every candidate, including the most senior executives, should be given a hard homework project to present to a panel, and refusal is itself a useful selection signal

It shows how committed they are, and in practice the good people all do it and get excited even when recruiters predict they won't

42:21 20VC: The Ultimate Hiring Playbook: Five Questions to Ask Every New Hire | What Makes Truly Great Leaders and How They Give Feedback | Do VCs Really Add Value; Lessons from Hard Fundraises with Matteo Franceschetti, Co-Founder @ Eight Sleep

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

Take-home assignments are worth running for every role, provided they are tightly scoped because they are a big ask of candidates

Open-ended scenarios let candidates show their thinking and the considerations they'd weigh

Scope: must be well scoped

47:35 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

Take-home assignments should be based on the hiring company's own business rather than the candidate's previous company

You want to see whether they think quickly and learn new things fast, which is an essential skill for a growth person

28:11 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

The first growth hire's interview process should include a take-home using your real data with deliberately planted outliers as Easter eggs

It reveals how candidates look at data, whether they find the anomalies, and whether they question the dataset

49:15 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

A candidate who feels a case study is beneath them is signalling they aren't the right fit, and the company should hire someone more junior instead

Interviews are meant to serve both sides, so refusing to demonstrate the work is itself disqualifying information

21:53 Refusing a case study as beneath them signals poor fit and a need for a more junior hire

Jason Fried · Jan 6, 2023

Hiring should be based on a real paid project rather than resumes, work history, or education

Doing a week of actual work together lets both sides look at and discuss real output and decide if they can work together

17:30 Paid trial project beats resume and work history based hiring

Martin Gontovnikas · Feb 14, 2024

Case-study exercises are the most informative part of a growth interview process, and they should be made as abstract as possible.

You get to see people in action; abstraction gives them room to reflect, ask questions and be creative, whereas a specific prompt leads the witness and only surfaces the structured answer you asked for — which is not what growth requires.

56:50 Abstract case study exercises are the most informative hiring signal for growth roles

Mike Duboe · Feb 15, 2023

Asking a candidate to write a growth model for a product is a valuable exercise, and the product chosen should match your own business type

Matching the business type (e.g. another marketplace if you run a marketplace) ensures the candidate understands the relevant set of levers and their interplay

24:52 Growth model exercise should mirror the candidates target business type

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Growth hiring doesn't require tangible skills tests or formal case studies — informal 'tell me about a time' conversations plus evidence of a bias to action are enough

Growth isn't engineering; if people can talk about the work well and have a bias to action, they'll either be able to do it or figure out how

37:25 Growth hiring needs no formal skills tests informal conversation and bias to action suffice