
Ethical to ask interview candidates to solve your company's toughest problems? - Katelyn
The company I work at evaluates candidates using problem-solving rounds where the candidate is asked to spend an hour solving a problem, and another hour presenting the solution.&lt;p&gt; The catch is that the questions we ask are directly related to problems our company is facing.  Whether we ask about storing data locally vs on the server, or how the candidate would gain exposure for a payments feature, the answer will be valuable to us, whether we hire him or not. Is this unethical or completely reasonable?
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staunch
1\. You shouldn't hide that it's a real (valuable) problem they're helping you
solve. A lie of omission.

2\. You sure as hell better actually be hiring people, not just having people
come in to help you for free.

Otherwise, any "work" done in an hour or two is the price of doing an
interview. Seems fine to me.

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dangerboysteve
It's unethical if you don't have any intention on hiring anyone. I heard
stories like this many years ago on how some individuals would interview
candidates for the sole purpose of harvesting ideas.

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RougeFemme
I think it's completely reasonable. It's no different from asking people at
conferences, in classes, etc. And I assume the primary purpose is gauge what
the candidate actually knows about the domain, how the candidate goes about
solving problems, etc., - not to actually get the perfect solution to your
problem, though that would be a bonus.

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andrew_gardener
As long as your truthful that these are problems your company's facing and are
actually hiring it should be fine. Please do hire the person who's solution
your going with and put them on that project though.

If your just scraping ideas/solutions, it is certainly unethical though I
don't think it is illegal.

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lsiebert
If you are using actual code they write, there are intellectual property
concerns to consider.

I think it would be ethical, if you compensated those you didn't hire but
who's works you used.

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manishg4
In one of the companies that I worked, and used to take interviews, the
general practice was to ask questions whose answers would benefit us. Also, in
certain cases, when we were starting out work on a different domain, we used
to call candidates who were experienced in that domain, and get our initial
doubts / understanding issues resolved via interviews!

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charlesism
It's okay only if you carefully _explain_ to the candidate, before the
interview, that you may be using his/her ideas (even if you do not hire
him/her).

If you do so _without_ consent, you make your company look like dirtbags:

"No, they didn't hire me, they just wasted four hours of my time, and stole
all my product ideas. Why pay a consultant when you can interview a sucker..."

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jacobquick
You should pay them $100/hr for the interview if you're having them work.
There are some companies that have people come in for half a day or a day as
part of their interview (not onboarding) and they cut them a check after.

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lostdog
You may be better off asking them to solve problems you've already solved. It
works around the ethical issue, and you have an excellent point of comparison
--what you already chose to do.

