How to Evaluate a Developer’s Coding Ability Prior to Hiring
Assessing a developer’s coding skills is an obvious and important step in the process of tech hiring. Despite this being one of the top concerns of a tech recruiter, the process has recently become more complex than ever before.
With remote hiring and working becoming increasingly popular, the average software developer assessment has evolved.
In this quick guide, we will talk about the best, most efficient ways you can go about testing the skills of the developers that you hire, regardless of whether your interview process is online or offline.
Let’s jump right in:
Check Out Their Portfolio
The first step may be a little obvious, but just like this entire process, it is an important one. Any developer worth their salt will have a portfolio showing off their best work. Looking at this portfolio, recruiters can determine two things with ease:
- If the candidate has the skills that you are looking for
- If their “best” matches your expectations
When looking at the portfolio, you should look at instances of projects where the developer has had to collaborate with others. Similarly, look for red flags, like a lot of unfinished projects.
Having said that, looking at the portfolio of a developer doesn’t tell you the complete story. For all you know, a portfolio can be easily furnished.
Check Out Their StackOverflow Profile
This step tells you how involved a programmer is in the overall development community. StackOverflow is a question-and-answer platform for all things development. Expert developers answer questions asked by inexperienced ones. It’s a thriving community that many developers love.
If the candidate is an enthusiastic and passionate developer, there is a good chance that they will have a StackOverflow account.
By checking out their account, you can see the kind of questions they are asking on the platform. More importantly, you can see how many (and what kind of) questions they are answering.
Browse Through Their Github Account
Github is like a social media network of developers. Here developers can create a repository of their code, contribute to others’ projects, and showcase their open source work.
Having a Github repository means that a developer is capable of writing code that can be easily understood and used by others. This type of skill is invaluable from a collaboration point of view.
When checking out the Github account of a candidate, the most basic criteria to judge them is to look at their number of followers. If they are truly contributing valuable code and information to the platform, they will have a high number of followers. Similarly, the number of repositories and contributions made are good metrics to judge the skills of a developer.
Online Coding Assessment
Looking at the past work of a developer is great, but it still doesn’t give a recruiter a transparent picture of their actual skills. Fortunately, these can be tested virtually using a programmer assessment test.
To conduct such an assessment, all you need is an online coding assessment platform, like the one made available by HackerEarth.
A coding assessment tool will enable you to get a holistic view of how the developer went about solving the coding problems given to them. Using such a platform will also allow you to deliver a delightful interview experience to the candidates.
Online Developer Interview
Recruiters can hire developers from anywhere in the world using online recruitment software. Such software can also provide you with the ability to not just get to know the candidate better and evaluate their soft skills. It will also enable you to throw live coding problems at them and see how they deal with problems under pressure.
Conclusion
There you have it, five dependable ways to evaluate the coding skills of developers before hiring them. Want to add to the list? Got something creative to share? Drop your ideas in the comments below!
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