The amount of information available on candidates to hiring managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.
When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing themselves as available on LinkedIn.
When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and usually often results in jumping straight to the on-site interview step.
Why isn't there a central website where you can just post your name-redacted-resume, accomplishments, and (optionally) target location and salary range anonymously, and if someone wants to reach out, then you can reveal your real name and e-mail?
Or better yet a Tinder-like interface where companies swipe candidates and candidates swipe companies, albeit with no photos, just a name-redacted resume?
Job/coding interviews are very difficult to do well, and many people such as myself tend to perform poorly due to the stress of the interview (so much that I’d rather stay in a mediocre position than go through the agony of interviewing — I hate it with every fiber of by being, and it correlates 0% to my in-job performance).
It’s just more data, which is especially useful if you’re on the fence with someone. You can also see creativity which isn’t something you can test well for in an interview — especially technical interviews.
False. It correlates directly to your job performance, unless you're YAML developer.
Not only does it not in my case, I don’t know how you could even make such a claim without knowing me, my work, and how I perform in such interviews… and that’s just me. Much has been written on this subject with similar anecdotes as well as quantitative research done by Google’s HR department. Clearly 0% is an exaggeration at large, but it’s well documented to be a poor correlate.
Interviews don't tend to include writing - and strong communicators who get nervous during interviewers may end up at a disadvantage.
I've done a lot of tech interviews lately, which is where I get at ability to do the work. But when a hiring team is trying to pick among the people who do approximately as well on that, then other factors can help.
At that stage, I definitely like to see things that indicate people are excited about something enough to just make a thing (a library, a small project, a blog post). If that's related to our domain or tech stack, even better. But even without that it's a plus in that it's a sign I can just give them a user problem or a technical issue and trust they'll go off and do something good with it.