There are 3 main phases of an interview process.

Initial Testing - This is the fastest way to filter out candidates. Give them an initial test to complete and you can immediately see who is serious about getting the job. It should be an hour long and you should make sure they have a 48 hour window to complete it (to compensate for time change).

The most important thing to look for is clarification questions. This might seem like a conflit with the Action Taken quality from the last task, but sometimes the action to be taken is to ask questions.

Here is an example test I'd give to a graphics designer. (I call it the gif test!)

Hi, I've included a PSD image and I'd like you to make the following changes.

- Change the colour of the image to red

- Turn the image into a .png

- Send it back in 48 hours.

If you have any questions or need clarifications MAKE SURE TO EMAIL ME. If you don't understand anything about this task you need to clarify them with me before starting the test.

Excited to see how you do!

Liam

So, seems like a pretty simple test. However, (and this is the point of the test) I don't send the candidate a PSD, I send them a GIF.

This is done purposely because a successful candiadate would:

• ask for a .psd file of the image as it would be very hard to run the exercise with the .gif format.
  
• they would ask for a clarification on the "red" or would present me with a few different options.
  

A great candidate would email me back, ask for clarifications and would be able to complete this test in under 5 minutes. A candidate who doesn't do this would take the rest of the day to either make changes to a .gif (which isn't editiable) or create a completely new image, both would take much longer than 5 minutes.