Ask a Manager

And now a break to talk about a sponsor…

If you’ve hired people before, you know the terrible feeling of realizing after just a few weeks with a new hire that she’s not going to cut it. But while hiring will never be an exact science, there is a way to minimize hiring mistakes: having candidates simulate activities similar to what they’d be doing on the job before you hire them.

I’ve talked regularly here about how crucial it is to see job candidates in action before making a hire, and so I’m glad to tell you about a new site sponsor, Tests for Geeks. Tests for Geeks is … well, exactly what it sounds like. In other words, it’s pre-employment tests for I.T. jobs. Employers can test candidates for tech jobs online in things like PHP, MySQL, C#, ASP .NET, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript. You can do it before an in-person interview, which can save significant time on both sides by helping to screen out candidates who don’t have the skills you need to do the job well, and you can test remote candidates before flying them in.

It works like this: You choose a test — let’s say a PHP test — send it to the job candidate, and when he or she is done, you automatically receive a report in your email, providing an overall score and scores for each category. It’s diirect, straightforward, and easy to use. The service also allows you to brand the test as your own — so that it’s coming from your own web domain and has the look and feel of your own testing service.

Prices start from $29, so it’s an affordable solution for hiring managers seeking to really understand what skills a developer is bringing to the table. Compare that to the cost of making a bad hire — heck, compare that to the cost of spending an hour or more of your time interviewing someone who doesn’t have the basic skills you need. By the time you bring someone in for an interview, you want to already know that they have the basic skills you need so that you can spend the interview time probing more nuanced elements of their candidacy — how they operate, their approach, etc. $29 is an easy price to pay for getting the question of fundamental skills out of the way so that you can probe on the stuff that’s harder to assess.

Check them out here.

Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Tests for Geeks.