Hiring without a test!

That's one of the earliest mistakes we have done at Khayal (my company). We were looking for 3D artists, while having near-zero experience of how 3D art is done. We discovered that top-notch 3D artists are a rare find in our country (Egypt), especially those with game art experience. We interviewed a couple of people, and were turned off by the quality of their work. Then suddenly someone appears with a very good resume, excellent samples and a very energetic character. The guy impressed us and we favored him over two other candidates for the job. The guy told us that he always participated in online 3D art competitions and that is the main reason his skills are so toned

He started working at Khayal. Always arriving late, we were still designing our game 'Abo Hadeed' (www.abohadeed.com or for Arabic speaking fellows www.abo7adeed.com). We required some low poly-characters to prototype our design. The guy took forever to produce the characters; he seemed to evade the delivery of any of his required tasks. This went on for a few months before we began to think of something. May be this guy didn't produce any of the samples he showed us during the interview, cause logically speaking the output we were receiving from this guy has nothing to do with magnificent 3D art he showed us at the beginning. Growing more suspicious, I googled the filenames of his samples!

And guess what, a 3D sample from every part of the world! A piece from Spanish artist, a piece from a Russian one and some from popular 3d art sites! When confronted the guy said that he rendered those files and adjusted the lighting and played a bit in with the objects inside! He even told us he never said he made them!

We immediately fired the guy, and got one of our earliest lessons. If you are hiring, always give the applicant some sort of test. If you are hiring a 3D artist ask him to produce something unique that he probably will not find elsewhere (in our case it's an Egyptian guy wearing some sort of Egyptian folkloric dress 'a galabya').

For a developer, it can be a take-home test, a coding question or even a coding exam. It even gets more interesting than that. Some voices claim that developers that struggle with coding large problems usually can't even develop trivial ones. One blog (Imran on tech) came up with a very interesting coding test:

"Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".

Most good programmers would be able to write that in a few minutes. To his dismay, he found that lots of his applicants can't code the answer. And some self-proclaimed senior developers 10-15 minutes to come up with a solution!

Alas, lesson learned, NEVER depend on the resume/regular interview alone!