271828 said:
Presumably, you're interviewing candidates who just spent 4-6 years in college and passed the FE exam.
I have very little faith in transcripts or the FE exam to screen anyone meaningfully from a technical perspective. I've encountered plenty of folks with excellent transcripts who were shockingly poor technically. I think that comes about via two mechanisms:
1) In the North American post secondary system, anybody who shows up to class regularly and turns in all of their assignments seems to be able to pull off a GPA of 3.2 or better regardless of whether they develop any real understanding. The system seems built to push students through unless they are downright negligent in my opinion. Screening for straight A's in the important stuff would help but, then, it would also shrink the talent pool down to a puddle.
2) Students "train" for exams like athletes train for events. Get in the zone, carb load, review homework and old exams... then
deliver at go time, ideally working from muscle memory. In many ways, its a system designed to showcase strategic test preparation rather than the depth of understanding. Any question that I would ask a new grad on a screening test would have been covered between the first and third academic years normally. With some time having elapsed since the "training", I feel that this is a more meaningful way to see if someone can actually apply what they purport to have learned.
271828 said:
The exam comes off like an ego challenge.
It is an ego challenge, by design and
for the candidate.
1) If someone's ego is so small and fragile that they freeze up like a deer in the proverbial headlights while taking a silly exam in a nice warm office, then I want them working for my competition rather than in the foxhole alongside me when things get rough, as they tend to.
2) If someone's ego is so large that they are offended by the very exercise of being tested, then I question whether that person will:
a) Possess enough humility to work well with my team and;
b) Be coachable as most folks entering structural engineering need to be. As we all know, there is a
lot to learn after graduation.
When folks are "put off" by a basic technical exam, I take that as bonus screening in the HR sense.
Any form of screening is stochastic by nature. When I judge people as I've described, I surely wind up with a few dolphins in the net. Nobody relishes the thought of having dolphins in their net but that's the nature of the beast. If you have more than one choice, recruitment becomes the act of judging candidates based on imperfect information.