“Interviews mean very, very little in our type of work,” Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner said Aug. 20 at the company’s Users Group Meeting covered by Becker’s. “We hire mainly by test.”
Ms. Faulkner hired her first programmer the old fashioned way, but when he started he told her he couldn’t do an assignment, she recalled in a Sept. 23 blog post. So she recruited her teenage son, who was then winning programming contests across the state, to develop a test.
“Occasionally, other IT shops asked about the ‘secret of our test’, and our explanation was a cheerful, ‘Just find a 15-year-old,'” she wrote.
This method helps narrow candidates as well. In the last year, Epic received 370,000 job applications, Ms. Faulkner said at the conference. It hired just over 2,000 of them, or 0.5%.
Epic used Ms. Faulkner’s son’s test for hiring for 18 years, until it became too widely known, and also created tests for roles outside of programming, she wrote.
“I used to interview people and then try to guess from the interview how well they’d do on the test,” Ms. Faulkner wrote. “I was right about 50% of the time, which is not nearly good enough. The tests were much more predictive than I was of a person’s future success at the job.”
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