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It occurred to me that I inadvertently participated in one form of
competency testing that got me an interview, and then a job: I
freelanced for a company, who then paid me for my work and got
interested enough to hire me. This approach to competency testing is
legally defensible because you never have to explain why you didn't
invite someone to be interviewed... only to justify why you didn't
select an angry candidate. This form of testing could be impractically
expensive unless you need to contract out the work anyway, and you
couldn't use it to hire someone on short notice, but it might work
very well in some cases.
-- Geoff Hart #8^{)}