What is an interviewer trying to achieve during a skills test?
To see if you can do the actual job, or to see how you problem solve?
How are those types of interviews termed?
The Workplace Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for members of the workforce navigating the professional setting. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityWhat is an interviewer trying to achieve during a skills test?
To see if you can do the actual job, or to see how you problem solve?
How are those types of interviews termed?
They address a lot of things and the tasks can also be of various kinds. For example, I would take a data scientists's interview as an example and explain you:
So, these are some common questions, whose specifics vary across domains and roles.
Basically, your skill in the domain, problem-solving ability, your thought process(remember the interviewer's asking you to speak aloud during these qns?) and your innovation abilities.
How are those types of interviews termed?
They are termed as assessments, but in most cases, they are plainly called interviews (as the problems are part of an end-to-end interview process)
In my experience in software development, those types of interviews are called "Technical interviews"
They can use these kinds of interviews to assess a number of different things, such as how you approach a problem, how good your problem solving skills are. Is your solution to the problem bog standard or does it have something that makes you stand out.
The most recent technical interview I did, I was actually told at the start that it would be impossible to finish the task to the fullest extent in the two hours I was given, but I was to have at least a working product at the end. So the idea there was to see how I prioritised my work, if someone had an excellent single section of the problem, but not a full working solution then that would be a red flag to an employer.
I would call them new hire interviews.
People lie about their abilities. In the worst cases, they don't even know that they're lying. It's called the Dunning–Kruger effect. Paradoxically, extremely competent people oftentimes find themselves to be rather incompetent, but extremely incompetent people oftentimes find themselves to be quite competent. Unfortunately, this latter set of people tend to submit lots of resumés (lots and lots and lots of resumés). It's sometimes hard to tell from the resumé whether an applicant is subject to the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Because of this, many employers use some sort of skills test as a filter, particularly for new hires.