If you ever find yourself in a conversation with me about the the interview process, I can almost guarantee that I’ll be talking about how unfair and ineffective it can be. I’ve fallen victim to a bad over-the-phone screen as well as a few bad in-person interviews. The problem with the interview process, in my eyes, has always been how subjective it is based on the thoughts and opinions formed by the interviewer on the day you meet with them. It sucks! If they’re having a bad day, there’s a chance that your interview won’t go well, and that doesn’t put every candidate on a level playing field. Enter the take-home screen and my experience with it.

A while ago I applied to be a web developer at a place called SeniorHomes. It’s a service that matches senior housing communities with families that seek to place their loved ones in a secure, monitored environment. I found them through a job listing that went through a headhunter agency, and I was contacted by a placement agent who served as a middle-man between myself and tech leads at SeniorHomes.

Now, outside of that fact, I had no idea what to expect in terms of screening. I didn’t know if they were going to call me, have me fill out a questionnaire, or perform a complex ballet routine. I was in the dark, until I received what was effectively a ‘take-home’ test. I was asked to turn a simple PNG image into valid XHTML/CSS. The mockup also came with a very informal design document stating basic behavior of the page as well as extra things I could do for ‘bonus points’ (as if I was really being graded on this). I was allowed to use any tools, any libraries that I wanted, just as long as I delivered a product that adhered to the behavioral and aesthetic standards of the mockup.

Now, after I was told I could use whatever I wanted, I was really excited. This screen became an opportunity to put my best foot forward. Nothing was off limits, and that meant that I could learn things for the sake of having a shot at an in-person interview. It fueled me to develop intensely for days on this single page. I used a JQuery tablesorter plugin, I nested the HTML5 and made it syntactically beautiful (birds would be jealous at the perfection of my nested markup), my CSS was laid out organizationally and I commented these files to hell and back. The result was something that I still keep on my hard drive and admire from time to time because for a brief period in my life, it was my brainchild.

Seniorhomes gave me a mockup, and told me to run with it. The ownership of that alone drove me to deliver the best code I could at that time.

Back to why it was awesome: instead of focusing on a predetermined set of problems that seem really hit or miss in a typical screening process,I was asked to show what I could do given a small set of limitations, not what programming paradigms I could recite from memory.

If you ever apply to a place that screens you by giving you a problem to solve and tells you to come back in a week with it, give it your absolute best. Interviews should be about showing what you can do, not what you can memorize. The SeniorHomes screen that I experienced gave me that opportunity, and I did in fact get the in-person interview with them.

View my SeniorHomes Mockup on Github

Clone it, make it better, check it out!