The Technical Skill Assessment Framework offers a unique approach to evaluating potential hires by providing a hands-on, realistic environment that closely resembles the codebases found in most companies. Created at a previous company, this home-grown application was intentionally designed with bugs and areas for improvement, allowing interviewers to assess a candidate's problem-solving skills, coding proficiency, and ability to enhance existing code. Designed for the applicant to complete tasks in an hour or less, this framework speeds up the hiring process and allows the applicant to showcase their skills in a realistic setting.

Incorporating the Technical Skill Assessment Framework into the hiring process offers several advantages:

• Evaluates technical skills in a practical, real-world setting.
• Assesses ability to navigate and enhance unfamiliar codebases.
• Complements traditional interview techniques with hands-on evaluation.
• Ensures potential hires can effectively contribute from day one.
• Efficiency boost to both parties by eliminating the need for additional and often lengthy interviews with different team members with the same applicant.

This evaluation method allowed for a thorough assessment of both troubleshooting and coding skills with minimal time commitments from both parties, ensuring that candidates possessed the necessary abilities to tackle real-world challenges.

Even with the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) that provide code generation and refactoring capabilities, such as ChatGPT and Claude, this process and framework continues to add value in an important way. By encouraging applicants to use LLM tools and submit their prompted conversations, interviewers can gain insight into applicants' ability to use these technologies and their prompt engineering skills.

By simulating the scenarios typically encountered in a company's codebase, the Technical Skill Assessment Framework provides valuable insights into a candidate's readiness to contribute effectively to the team. This realistic evaluation helps identify individuals who can hit the ground running and make a positive impact from the start, ultimately refining the hiring process and ensuring the best fit for the organization.