Bang. That phrase blown everything up. Some companies contact you and instead of online screening, they propose you to solve a test task. How do you feel about it?
I had a recruiter contacted me for a position - that's actually great because I was looking for job. We chatted a bit about the project and the company, everything seemed to be fine.
Oh btw, we have a programming assignment for you to complete, that shouldn't take more than 10 hours of your time. You have 5 days. Go get it.
The first thing I would ask this recruiter now is "What is the difference between Java and JavaScript?". Because 10 hours task doesn't seem fancy to me. That might correlate with the professional level of recruiter somehow.
I've also seen some people that were given 1 hour tasks (idk who estimates that) and these tasks took them like 5 hours. I don't see this as a valid completed task to send it back to employer because that's the point where you literally misrepresent your productivity. Don't do that. If employer estimates this task as 1-hour, then spend 1 hour doing it and show your progress. Otherwise, if you cheat and still get an offer, you might find yourself in a situation where you have to meet arbitrary and unrealistic deadlines. Quality of the submission shouldn't be correlated higher with the free time candidate has than with his skill.
The best way to answer that kind of inadequate test task proposals is "Sorry to tell you this, but I currently do not have the time resources to complete the task. Best of luck finding a candidate"
If that's the company of your dreams, then go on and try to solve this test task, it's ok. But just don't be over enthusiastic about the task random employer sent you. Committing to a test task is usually not the best option.
Test tasks are not about:
- Attitude & Effort
- Culture fit
- Filtering out bad developers
Test tasks are about:
- A lot of unpaid work
- Filtering out good developers most of the time