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Does a generic competency test have a place in your interview?
Instead of a Kata
A kata is a take-home task provided by a company.
A kata is a take-home task provided by a company as part of the interview process.
In all sorts of roles, this is a common part of the process. In Front-End it may be building a website. In Data Science it may be something like “find three insights”. In Marketing it may be “come up with a marketing strategy”, one they could steal and run away with. Whatever the kata is, it’s always free work and an expectation of best work in a small period of time. Not only is this disrespectful to the candidate’s time, but it also costs a company some of the best applicants. Due to time requirements, people with free time will be able to complete the task to a higher standard.
A kata is a generic competency test. Given an unlimited amount of time, can you perform a task?
“it should only take about two hours”.
You are then behind other application quality if you do as instructed. Other applicants have gone overboard and deployed their website using AWS. you better go overboard too! Calling out that they only asked for two hours of work isn’t going to warrant any weakness. You know you need to give your best for this…
