I like this approach a lot. Assuming the idea is just to make it a teeny bit more difficult to apply than firing off an email to jobs@wherever.com, this is a great way to do it. It filters out those with no real interest in the company and establishes a competency floor (albeit a rather low one), and selects for people who are interested in solving problems in the most elegant way possible -- by actually giving them a problem to solve.
I didn't try this particular challenge, but it reminds me of Reddit's recent job postings (which I was able to complete in a couple minutes using Google and the command line on my Ubuntu machine) in spirit. Maybe the tone with which they communicated it was a little smug, but if you had your choice of people who spent as little as 7-8 minutes on this versus folks who needed to work on it for a whole afternoon, who would you choose to hire?
I didn't try this particular challenge, but it reminds me of Reddit's recent job postings (which I was able to complete in a couple minutes using Google and the command line on my Ubuntu machine) in spirit. Maybe the tone with which they communicated it was a little smug, but if you had your choice of people who spent as little as 7-8 minutes on this versus folks who needed to work on it for a whole afternoon, who would you choose to hire?