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I actually agree with your thesis! You're right that candidates are only willing to put in this level of effort if they are really interested and consider your company a "top 5%" big opportunity.

So it's critical that you convince them that you are in that top 5%! You don't want an employee to join you because their top choices turned them down -- you want to be their first choice.

We regularly won candidates away from Google, Facebook, Uber, Twitter, etc. If you want to build a great team, you're going to need to be able to do this too.

Re: code reviews -- yes, we gave everyone a thorough code review.

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>You don't want an employee to join you because their top choices turned them down -- you want to be their first choice.

Why?

Unless you're offering FAANG levels of compensation, isn't it pretty arrogant to think you're anyone's top choice?

Candidates can easily lie to you about this. In fact in my last job hunt I was instructed to lie about this by recruiters who are actually being paid by the company I'm lying to.

I told every company I interviewed at they were my top choice.

If it's "arrogant" to think that a startup could be anyone's top choice, then startups would never be able to attract any good talent.

It's not arrogant. It's simply creating a process where you can filter out for folks who are truly excited to build what you're building and believe in the potential future impact. It might also turn out to be a big payday, or not.

Not everyone is simply chasing that 400k TC every year. If you lie about your excitement, a panel of folks who have went through the same process will easily sniff it out.

Some people are better at pretending to be excited than others. Recruiters for example are very good at it. Not all engineers are bad actors.

Well, then perhaps the test is working as intended! Candidates who aren't sufficiently excited about your company will drop out at this stage.

This doesn't make any sense.

Your intention is to get candidates to fake excitement or drop out?

I think the idea is that it's easy to fake excitement until you're asked to spend six hours on a take home test. At which point you'd actually have to be pretty excited to do it.

Or desperate.