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Comment by eschneider | Hacker News Reader

When I get a resume for someone I've been asked to interview, I'll certainly look at any github profiles, and if there's something relevant there, I'll often use their project as a basis for whatever coding exercise we do, such as extend this class to add X functionality. Or use it as a basis for design questions.

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A nonstandard interview process like this is illegal in some jurisdictions. It may run afoul of US law too, depending on the outcomes.

It is safer and easier to use a one size fits all interview.

Genuinely curious, which jurisdictions is it actually illegal?

Interview with coding and design is nonstandard and possibly illegal? We must be living in different timelines.

Except it's pretty much standard. If there isn't a github link, I'm still going to tailor the programming questions to a context that I infer from the past experience on their resume (as in, they said they did X, so they should know about Y) but with a bit less accuracy.

Most of the interview is getting the candidate to show me that they know _something_ in depth and I'm not super concerned with exactly what it is. (If they've learned something in depth, I expect they can also learn the details of what we do. :) So the exact same questions to every candidate serves no one's interests.

I think the nuance here is if you tailor ALL interviews for a specific job based on each candidate to the point where the interviews are no longer directly comparable, that could constitute a hiring practice that would run afoul of some laws in various places.

However, what you're describing sounds reasonable to me - you're offering the same overall interview structure, just tailoring the question to delve more into someone's bespoke experience. That's a hell of a lot more work than a one size fits all (ala leetcoding style) question - kudos to you.

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