You know who does really well in behavioral interviews? People with big egos who embellish stories and take credit rather than giving it. People who are less-self-aware and don’t realize their own failures.
You know who does great in project presentations? People who over their career have put in the time, who know their shit, give credit rather than taking it, and are self-aware enough to know they aren’t perfect.
Recently while Googling “good take-home projects for content marketers” I found a slew of irate articles bemoaning the assignment of take-home projects. Candidates expressed frustration that companies were asking them to do weekends of free work without reason.
There’s a wrong way to do take-home projects. Like asking you to do the project as a filter before even speaking with you. Or asking the candidate to create a marketing plan (too broad) for a product that hasn’t launched yet (are they going to pilfer your best ideas?).
On the other hand, take-home projects are incredibly helpful at shining a light on strong candidates. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve done a complete 180 on a candidate that I was excited about as soon as I saw the project. I’ll do a 45 minute phone screen and come away excited to bring the person on-site. And 10 minutes into a project presentation it’s clear s/he could talk the talk but cannot walk the walk.
So how do you design a project that really works?
Projects Can Reduce Hiring Bias
Rachel Thomas who writes about diversity in tech hiring, writes that standard behavioral interviews leave more room for bias. Instead, interview processes should
Resemble the actual work the candidate would do
Have clear rubrics
Be consistent and standardized
That sounds an awful lot like project work. So if you’re an employer, please do offer take-home projects. In fact, if you’d like me to send you a detailed description of the take-home project interviews I’ve designed and used for the roles I’ve hired for, comment on my LinkedIn post here.
Advanced: If you have the volume and team capacity to do this, have a grader evaluate projects without names attached. Rachel Thomas reminds us that:
Resumes with traditionally African-American names are viewed more negatively than resumes with stereotypically White names, and job applications with female names are viewed more negatively than job applications with male names).
Make Projects Less Cumbersome
First, make sure you really need a project: for a designer or copywriter you might get some or all of what you need from portfolios.
Second, consider where to insert the project in the process. Think of your hiring process as a relationship between equals. As a courtship. At the beginning of the journey, you’ve spent less time together, you’re less serious about each other, so you can expect less from them as well. Once you’ve done a few phone interviews, and you’re more serious, it’s okay to expect more.
If a project is necessary, one creative way to make it less cumbersome for candidates is to add a time-limit. Uber did this as a filtering round for it’s City GMs: candidates were sent the data-set at a pre-scheduled time and had to upload the completed data with answers 2 hours later. You can obviously do this just as easily over email.
Or roll the project into the interview loop. At Codecademy, we’d often give candidates a 100 minute block during the on-site: 60 minutes to do the project and 40 to present their results. According to Rachel Thomas, "the Airbnb data science team gives candidates a few hours to work by themselves but can ask questions of the team during this time.” The added benefit of the interview loop approach is to see how candidate thinks under pressure and what they come up with without outside resources.
How to Perfect Your Interview Project
Do iterate on your project. It might feel like you should hold the project constant to evaluate across candidates. But in-between “rounds” of candidates you can get in there and make edits. I re-shaped the raw data to make a conclusion more obvious or the contrast between two channels more stark.
Do create space for a conversation about the project. I always include a project presentation - usually 20 minutes to present the project and 20 minutes for questions. I typically ask why they took the approach they did, what else they considered, about the thinking behind specific choices they made. To conclude the project presentation, I ask folks two key questions:
Why did you make this choice? You can learn a lot by asking folks to defend their choices and explain their thinking.
What else did you consider? This is an opportunity especially for creative projects to showcase the altitude they are thinking at. It’s great to hear designers mention the user persona or broader business goals.
How do you think you did? I learned this one from when we were hiring Codecademy’s VP of Product. The best candidates for me are ones who show humility even when they did well, and who are self-aware enough to recognize where they could have done better.
Do you have any questions about the project for me? This is a great closer. Candidates who are hungry will be fired-up to know the right answers.
Do seed take-home projects with material that can be improved, rather than projects that start from a blank slate. For a designer, instead of designing a landing page from scratch, consider starting them off with one of your older, flawed landing pages and asking them to critique it. For a performance marketer, start them off with raw data and some business context, and ask them to draw conclusions from the data and recommend next steps.
Do get creative to shorten the hiring process and reduce the number of 1-on-1 interviews. If we feel it's important to include internal stakeholders in the process (like the VP of another department or a junior person who’d work closely with this hire) I’ll include these folks in the project presentation, a group-lunch, or a 2-on-1 informal interview.
Do define a distinct objective for every interview. It doesn’t help you learn anything new if every interviewer asks the same surface-level questions, so stake-out what the purpose of each interview is in the process. Instead, I’ll assign interviewers to screen for specific talents or skills important to us.
Do be explicit in your prompt about what the project is screening for. When hiring for a Director of Performance Marketing role, I was looking to see they had enough experience combined with excel skills to take unstructured funnel data and create 2-3 pivot tables, and then draw a few conclusions based on what they saw. I was clear in the prompt that we were looking for analytical ability and conversion optimization experience.
Don’t design a project that can’t be misconstrued as “free work.” For a product marketing take-home, I asked candidates to plan the launch of an obviously-fictitious product. For a paid acquisition take-home, I made clear the data wasn’t real.
Don't put a take-home project at the beginning of your recruiting funnel. It’s just not fair to ask the candidate for that much work that early in the relationship. I typically have a recruiter screening call, then a hiring manager screening call, then I invite candidates to present the take-home project as part of a full interview loop. If I’m really on the fence about a candidate, and want to use the project as a filter, I might do the project presentation after 2 phone screens but before committing to the full loop.
Do make projects specific. Coming up with a “marketing plan” is incredibly broad and is a project that really requires weeks of context and contemplation your candidate won’t have. For a content marketer, I’ll pick a very narrow problem-area like “draft our response to this customer review thread on Reddit.”
How to Defend Against Unreasonable Projects from Employers
If you’re a candidate, you have to understand that the employer may be trying to run a process that is consistent across candidates in the interest of evaluating everyone the same way. And I respect that. And if it’s a company that his hired for this exact role many times before, they may feel like they have a consistent process dialed (think sales, where a 100 person company may have hired 20 sales reps before you). But if it’s a company with less than 100 employees, they may be open to feedback on their process. And especially if it’s a role the company’s filling for the first time, like you’ll be the very first Content Marketing Manager, they may also have some ability to incorporate your feedback.
Do ask questions. If their prompt is too broad, or your approach would clearly require more hours, or something about the prompt is confusing, make sure to ask questions. It might be a mistake on the hiring manager’s end (I’ve done this before) and their response can help point you down the right path. As a hiring manager I’m on the candidates side, I want to see you knock our socks off!
Do give the recruiter (or even better the hiring manager) feedback on the process. Unless it’s a particularly rigid organization, they will likely be open to rearranging the hiring funnel such that the project comes later in the journey and is only given to the candidates who are most-serious.
Do employ a “yes, and” approach. Rather than pushing back with a “no,” try something like “I love this project as a way for me to showcase my strengths, but could we perhaps make the prompt more specific.” Or “I love this project as a way for me to showcase my strengths. But I also want to learn more about the manager I’d be working with and about the company. What are your thoughts on having a phone screen with her first, and doing the project as the next step?”
Do make any suggestions over the phone (or better yet video chat) rather than over email, so you can position it appropriately and gauge feedback. And try to speak directly to the hiring manager. They’ll typically have more latitude to adapt their process
Do the take-home project. If you don’t feel you can do #1 and #2, or you fail to change the process, make sure to still do the project. You’ll learn a ton from being forced to put pen to paper and forcing your mind to translate experiences into fungible frameworks into new a plan for a different company.
Do give recruiters and hiring managers feedback after the process is over. The best companies believe in candidate experience and pay attention to the feedback they receive.
Good luck and be sure share your project ideas with me!