A few people I hired this or similar ways became my friends and we still connect, get coffee, etc. Your mileage may vary. If you want to hire warm bodies to write code then this is not a good way. If you want to hire people who will make strategic difference to your startup/company, then it is one of the possible ways.
>A few people I hired this or similar ways became my friends and we still connect, get coffee, etc.
Becoming a friend or not is not a causal relation to competence, but rather to your preference. And in this context makes me doubt that what underwater said in his comment might be the real goal: >They're good for determining if the test taker is the test author, and not much else.
More plausible that you only wanted to hire, well, people just like you (and that's why you became friends). Not withstanding the glaring obvious survivor bias. But if it worked, who am I to question it.
> If you want to hire warm bodies to write code then this is not a good way.
Yea but my point wasn't (or yours either) to hire warm bodies, but people that "speak up their mind, challenge manager". And we are talking how efficient(or inefficient) this is, and how many false negatives this method produce. and if your pool of applicants is big enough, it will produce true positives anyway, irrelevant of the efficiency of the filter.
Personally I think even "agreeableness" personality test mumbo-jumbo would be a better metric/filter for gaining people with "speak up their mind, challenge manager" characteristics.