My Frustrating Experience with Hired.com
When I first started looking at Hired.com I found many positive reviews of the service.
I found this thread on Reddit. And other developers I respect spoke highly of their service.
With all that, I felt filling out a profile would be a good use of time.
I found the experience very disappointing.
A first glance, Hired.com seems to offer a good service, but after investing a significant amount of time filling out my profile, I was left extremely frustrated and disappointed.
What isn't clear at the beginning is that even after spending the 30-90 minutes to fill out your profile, you may never actually talk with a recruiter.
It's very possible that I'm still too inexperienced to get a job through Hired.com. I may suck a lot more than I realize. But in reading that some go through Hired.com straight out of a bootcamp, I thought my 2-4 years experience was plenty to land at least one interview.
Have things changed at Hired.com?
Out of all the experiences I read, no one mentioned going through what I did to get started.
I was left with the impression that folks were uploading a resume, completing a profile and then were quickly receiving interview requests.
I never got that far.
My Profile
I filled out the following details on my profile:
- remote only
- full time or contract
- 60k CDN minimum salary
- $40 / hour
I've worked on numerous solo projects, websites and large SaaS applications.
I'm very experienced with the full spectrum of front end work - CSS, JavaScript, including ES6 / Vue.js / React.js, etc.
I'm also experienced with Node.js, Socket.io, Laravel and WordPress. I'm not afraid of the backend, and have even designed several APIs.
Finally, my past co-workers speak well of me and my abilities. I'm not that green, and I work well with others.
Given my experience, I thought my numbers were actually a bit on the low end.
submitProfile()
After completing my profile, I had to wait several days to get any sort of response from Hired.com.
When I did receive a response it was a boilerplate message asking me to complete an online skills test using Codility.com.
Now, I actually liked the Codility platform. It was easy to use, and Codility itself offers a practice problem to help you get acclimated to their method of doing things.
For the challenge I had to complete two tasks.
One task was in parsing strings and another involved some basic math.
These aren't unlike the challenges I'm used to seeing on Free Code Camp.
I feel my answers were well written. I gave careful thought to making my code very readable, clear, and succinct.
My code passed all the tests provided by Codility to check my work.
But I failed the challenge.
Why?
I have no idea.
Cover all edge cases?
Codility does warn that their tests will only offer so much feedback. I was encouraged to consider all edge cases and possibilities in my code.
That's a tall order.
Again, perhaps I'm just too inexperienced, but I've only ever met developers that rely on tests, co workers and QA to find ALL possible edge cases.
Software dev, I believe, is a team sport, and weeding out candidates based how they perform in a vacuum doesn't seem very realistic.
Further, Hired.com can't tell me why I failed.
Yes, unfortunately it does not appear you passed the test this time around and will not be going live as of now. As for the exact results, I cannot specify more than passing/not passing. My apologies.
You will be eligible to retake the assessment six months after your initial attempt. I definitely encourage you to study up and give the test another go after that time. We'd be lucky to have you!
umm thanks?
Had I known I would have to take this test, and either pass / fail without any feedback whatsoever, I would have put my energies somewhere else - like with a company that allows me to actually talk to a human being.
Dude, do you even code?
The whole experience left me with the impression that Hired.com is full of Ivory tower elites that won't even condecend to mere mortals so we can reach our career goals, too.
On the surface they are helpful and approachable, but the walk isn't matching the talk.
If they are only interested in the top 10 that double majored in Math and Computer Science, fine, but at least be up front with that.
I'm fine with failure so long as I have the opportunity to improve.
The frustrating part of this whole experience is the complete lack of feedback.
I can take criticism.
I'm not so arrogant as to think my code is perfect, or that I know everything.
But give me a reason for the failure so I know what to fix.
Here are my answers:
https://codepen.io/patrickodacre/pen/mwKgwz/
https://codepen.io/patrickodacre/pen/pwKYWG
On Codility you can see an answer to this FAQ:
"I clicked ‘Run’ and it says “OK”. Will I score 100%?"
That’s not sufficient! Clicking ‘Run’ only verifies whether your code compiles and returns the correct result for the example test case. You need to make sure that your code works correctly and efficiently with all possible inputs.
I had 30 minutes per challenge. I managed to get things working for the tests provided, but I obviously missed something.
I would be thrilled if someone could point out what I did wrong.
What do you think?
Am I completely off-base?
Do I really just suck, or is this just another example of a really poor way to hire developers?
I was searching for “Does the Hired website suck?” and found this post. :-)
Looks like they brought their assessments in-house. And well, played with the practice assessment and hit “Finish” and 404??? Thanks Hired!
But I thought I’d look at the problems. Maps are fun, but filtering that many times in a row in JavaScript would be a serious problem. Maybe with Python and generators, or Haskell?
But this problem appears to have a solution like this unless I am not understanding the problem?
Right?
Patrick,
I see for the second JavaScript challenge you do a lot of interesting thinking about the problem, weeding out numbers that can’t be perfect squares, etc. Might that be the painful way…?
What I mean is, given the numbers provided (-300 and 250), couldn’t we just do this?
First, remember there are no negative perfect squares. Anything squared, including negative numbers, results in a positive number. So if we’re counting perfect squares they can only be between 0 and 250.
Take the square root of your top number. In this case it will be “15-point-something.” (15-squared is 225; 16-squared is 256…)
Round those decimals off, and you have “15”. And we can intuit…that every integer up to 15, if squared, must fit the set you’re trying to count. (1-squared is less than 250, and 2-squared, and 3-squared, etc…up to 15-squared.)
Add one more to 15, to include zero-squared. Answer: 16.
I tested your second code and wonder what the range of A and B exactly is.
If the range of A and B is an array of these values: A, A+1, A+2, … , B-2, B-1.
(like Python range(3,6) is 3,4,5)
then the test might be failed.
Test with A=9, B=16
Your result is 2 perfect square numbers which are 9 and 16
But it should be 1 perfect square number which is 9.
Of course, that is not fair if the assessment does not clarify what ‘range’ exactly means.
Oh, and I try testing with a huge number [0, 100000000]. It seems your code cannot handle that. What is the maximum allowed input?
Hi Rosalind,
Thank you for commenting. I’m sorry for the late reply.
I have since learned that the reason my code failed was because I didn’t understand how to meet the time complexity requirements of the algorithm.
At the time I didn’t understand Big-O at all.
Fortunately, shortly after this experience, I interviewed with a CTO that graciously explained this gap in my knowledge, and I have since filled that gap.
I will leave this up in the hope that other devs can learn from it.
Thanks for the article, hired.com hasn’t accepted my application won’t tell me why and I’ve been trying to figure out why. I come from more of a creative side, so my developing experience doesn’t show well enough on paper I guess. Just curious, how did you end up solving it to run faster? I failed the google code challenge for the same reason. But, For your square root problem, instead of listing any numbers, I would just test factorials to figure out how many square roots in the range. Though I think there is an ever faster way I just can’t quite put my finger on.