DR Chrono has an add on the front page where people do their "challenge" in order to compete for an interview.

Worst example yet.

Apparently the company side generates scores based on whatever arbitrary factors HR chooses, including time, and some companies were simply comparing scores to decide who to hire.

Using it as a way of collaborating during a phone interview seems pretty reasonable.

Hi, one of the founders of drchrono here. I think the hackerrank challenge works well for us as a company and is better for most candidates than phone screening or resume reviews. It isn't perfect and it has strong and weak points like any interview process.

There are really great programmers we hired who first came through this hackerrank challenge that we would have missed if we had used more traditional interview methods like screening their resume and a phone interview. As an engineer myself I hate technical phone screenings and resume reviews, I HATE doing them when I'm hiring and I HATE being subjected to them if I was looking for a job.

Based on this post and some other feedback I've seen, there must be a set of good programmers (who companies like drchrono and others would love to hire) who do terribly on these types of tests or just don't want to commit to taking the 60 minutes or so to do these tests.

If you don't want to commit the time to do the tests and you want to blanket apply for tons of jobs at once, then larger companies/recruiters are a better fit and I'm ok as a tech startup if we miss out on you. We want to recruit people who are passionate about changing healthcare and our company's mission, and having someone commit an hour of time feels fair. We as a company spend 10+ hours for every candidate we screen so asking for one of your hours for 10+ of ours seems reasonable (I'm sorry if other people don't feel that way.)

We use Python/Django on our backend and we found the tests are reasonable to complete in Python. For iOS developers the C-type challenges seem an order of magnitude harder. So language experience and the technical limits of hackerrank do make this process have blind spots and we know we are going to miss out on some good candidates. I still think hackerrank is the best solution I've seen so far to objectively judge technical talent and works better than phone screens and resume reviews (which are horrible and I personally hate).

We've used hackerrank (formerly interviewstreet) almost since we started hiring software engineers, so every engineer we currently have working at drchrono passed through the hackerrank challenge as the first line interview. One other benefit is that if someone gets a good score on the test we feel 90% sure that the person is technically strong enough to be able to do their job and we focus the rest of our interactions with the candidate on other variables.

I think the best way to apply and get a job at a company that uses challenges like this if you are bad at them, is to have built awesome stuff: Have an app in an app store that people use, have a popular website, have contributed significantly to an amazing project/product) and to reach out through your network on Linkedin / Angellist to people at the company. This works better for candidates who have done a lot of stuff. I've seen programmers coming out of high school who have really cool apps in the App Store and have cool websites / web applications, so this is achievable for developers of any background.