In the technical sector, there is vast competition as compared to any other field. Undoubtedly, there is no shortage of tech talent in the world as well. However, this creates chaos – as recruiters find it difficult to assess the candidate’s skills and onboard the right person for their organization.

This problem can be resolved when recruiters will start leveraging the power of a coding assessment test to gauge the candidate’s hard and soft skills. Every recruiter must consider it part of a pre-employment assessment to choose the right talent among the vast talent pool.

An online coding assessment is an effective way to assess a candidate’s technical skills easily. It offers several benefits to businesses and recruiters as it is a cost-effective approach towards onboarding a talented technical team.

With coding tests, recruiters can quickly assess 100+ candidates in minutes, using an auto-grading system report. This report helps recruiters determine who has passed the coding test and selected for the next hiring process.

Assessing a candidate’s technical skills has become a crucial step in the technical hiring process. Yet, according to CodinGame, more than 60% of recruiters struggle to find qualified candidates. Indeed, the majority of bad hiring in tech recruiting comes down to a lack of technical skills.

That said, here are some of the ways to assess a candidate’s coding skills:

Check Their Portfolio

A portfolio plays a crucial role in a developer’s life as it is the best way to showcase their coding skills to the recruiters. A portfolio can be of any type and size, ranging from single web pages to complex software projects – depending on how experienced a person you’re looking for.

As a recruiter, you need to look out how passionate candidates are in their chosen field. How did they integrate with other libraries? What tactics do they use to solve a real-life problem? When you get an answer to these questions, you’re on the right path to onboarding the right talent for your organization.

Check Their Online Presence

If recruiting sites is not an option, then you can check a developer’s online presence on several sites such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc. These are the platforms where developers are mostly active and solve a particular set of problems.

Through this, you can dig into their profile and get a deep insight into how they approach the technical issues and solve them. However, these platforms are not a CV, but they will give you invaluable insights into a candidate’s technical skills.

Conduct A Live Coding Test

Once you’ve found the right candidate, it’s time to conduct a live coding test. This recruitment stage will determine whether the candidate is the right fit for the organization or not.

By conducting a live coding test, you can see how a candidate solves a particular set of problems or write a code in real-time. There are tons of online tools; some of them are Intervue, HackerEarth, CodeSumbit, etc. With these tools, you can easily conduct a live coding test. Live coding boils down to allowing both parties to get a deep insight into each other in a dynamic and conversation setting.

In a coding test, candidates are often asked to put their best forward while doing a certain task. These tasks can include:

• Doing A Very Basic Task: In hiring a fresher, you can ask them basic questions such as invert a binary tree, print a string, write a calculation code, etc.
• Writing An Algorithm: In this case, you can ask them to write an algorithm of binary search, linear search, selection sort, adding two numbers, etc. Again, it can be asked to both freshers and experienced candidates.
• Fixing A Piece Of Code: For instance, you are hiring a web developer, and your website’s chatbot function is not working. In that case, you can ask the developer to write a code to fix the chatbot issues.
• Performing A Complex Task: This phase is for experienced candidates. For example, if you are hiring a web developer, questions will include sophisticated technologies and cloud hosting servers to store the data.

The primary aim of online coding tests is to show recruiters how candidates will solve different problems if they were hired. Also, this test will give you a deep insight into how much time is taken by a candidate to solve a particular set of questions.

Today, more and more companies conduct live coding tests using the best tools, and these tools should follow a candidate-driven approach. It means that the tool shouldn’t have complex functionalities so that it becomes difficult for both parties to operate the tool.

Apart from that, there are several ways to improve the candidate experience, such as:

• Give Feedback As Soon As Possible: Candidates are impatient – and they’ll move to other opportunities when they didn’t get any feedback from your side. Hence, you will lose a lot of opportunities to hire the right talent. So, to enhance the candidate experience, provide feedback as soon as possible.
• Introduce Your Work Culture: In remote hiring, you need to find a way to introduce your brand culture to candidates in real-time. For example, show them your company’s articles, achievements, and introduce your team to them.
• Communication: Communication is the key to successful remote hiring. Before an interview, you must communicate your requirements for coding assessments such as a laptop, webcam, stable internet connection, and possibility of questions to be asked.

Conducting a coding test might sound complicated, but it is much simpler than you think. When you have the right strategies, tools, and technologies by your side, you can become an expert in the recruiting field.

That said, these modern trends will continue to evolve, and as a recruiter, you need to revamp your recruiting strategies to streamline the process and improve candidate experience.

You can checkout coding assessments that you can take using Intervue.