Complete Coding Assessment Guide — Definition, Advantages, and Best Practices

A version of this article has been published on The HackerEarth Blog.

Recruiting, hiring, and onboarding fresh talent comes with its own set of challenges. And one thing that makes the process even more challenging is resumes. Can you accurately gauge a candidate’s skill just through a single page of text? No, you cannot. This is why you need to conduct coding assessments to evaluate their skills and expertise and make sure they are exactly what your organization needs.

But how do you correctly run and manage a coding skills assessment? Are there any dos and don’ts you need to keep in mind? What coding assessment platform should you use? Keep reading to get the answers to all your burning questions.

How to test coding skills, the easy way?

Before you even begin drafting quick coding challenges for your next round of interviews, it is important to understand that it is impossible to test every single area of the candidate’s knowledge of coding. As a hiring manager or recruiter, you need to prioritize certain skills over others to come to a decision.

When hiring high-level candidates, you simply cannot conduct lengthy interviews or ask them very basic coding assessment questions — they know they have the skills and they will not concern themselves with your process. Understanding the talent pool and the skills you require is the first step of a successful coding assessment.

Maintain objectivity by using technical screening tools that will keep unintentional bias at bay. Narrow down the skills you are looking for and use the library of questions from these coding assessment platforms to find what you are looking for. Is it an industry-experienced coder you need, or a graduate fresh out of college? Know the answers to these questions before creating a coding challenge.

The tech industry is constantly evolving, so why should the tech stack of your organization stay the same? Make sure to cover new and pre-existing programming languages, advent in technology, and skill requirements to tackle the modern coding battlefield and ever-changing tech stack.

No candidate wants to spend hours solving a single coding assessment question. Create quick coding challenges that can be solved in under an hour. Also, frame direct questions so that the candidate spends less time decoding the question and more time on finding the solution.

Why you should be using a coding assessment tool

• Using the right technical screening tool can help you reduce the burden on your workforce by efficiently automating the process
• A well-constructed code assessment process ensures that the skills of a potential candidate are noticed early on. This can help your company retain skilled individuals and you can gauge the right compensation and incentives for the role
• Coding skills assessment tests ensure that the selection you make is based on facts and data and does leave any margin for bias. This means that there is a proper, structured method of finding the right talent by doing away with haphazard methods that do not paint an accurate picture

Create the perfect coding assessment with HackerEarth

HackerEarth is an online coding assessment platform and technical screening tool that allows organizations to design specific tests and evaluate candidates to find the right individuals to employ. A few reasons you should use HackerEarth for your next coding test -

• Create customized tests in just a few minutes with over 13,000 questions and 80+ skills
• Scale the hiring process over a large region by enabling multiple recruiters to hire candidates
• Automate the evaluation process to screen for the best candidates
• Create reports on the performance of candidates for further analysis and evaluation
• Design and implement assessments using over 40 programming languages

HackerEarth enables recruitment teams to streamline their processes, thus bringing down turnaround rates drastically. Performance reports further allow recruitment teams to break down and analyze micro-details, such as the time in which the assessment was completed, replaying the keystrokes used while coding, and so much more. Organizations that use HackerEarth as a coding assessment platform observe a marked rise in the quality of candidates ready for hire. The interview-to-hire ratio was drastically improved in these cases.

Additionally, HackerEarth secures the privacy of candidates by masking personally identifiable information in video interviews. Going by these features, it is easy to see why HackerEarth is one of the most highly-rated and trusted coding assessment platforms on the market today!