Interview Coding Challenges: How to Hire Developers
Table of Contents
Summary
Coding challenges are a great way to assess a candidate’s coding skills. But you need to be sure to use the right type of challenge and give the candidate all the information they need to complete it. If you do, you will be well on your way to hiring the best developers for your team.
A coding challenge is just one way to figure out if an applicant would be a good fit for your company. It helps to give you an idea of a software engineer’s technical skills; if they can approach problem-solving in a clear and concise manner; and if they would understand the requirements of the job under pressure. It is important to make sure that the coding challenges are realistic and accurately reflects what an employee would encounter while on the job. This significantly increases your chances of hiring the best developer for the position.
Why coding challenges/codathons are important
76% of organizations rely on some sort of Pre – Hire Assessments to evaluate candidates. These codathons (Hackathon for coding challenges) or coding assessments reveal the depth of candidate skills mentioned on the resume in addition to a foundational understanding of their problem-solving and logical abilities. Additionally, when hiring managers have access to relevant, fact-based information on candidates’ abilities and performance, they are dissuaded from making a biased selection of candidates. Thereby making way for a thorough and impartial hiring procedure.
Best practices for coding challenges
If you want to get the most out of coding challenges, it ought to reflect a problem that actually occurs in software development.
Finding a bug in troublesome code is one example of a challenge. Another challenge is developing a new feature and figuring out how to integrate it. To objectively quantify the performance of a candidate throughout the coding challenge, there should be clear goals and measuring mechanisms in place. The hiring organization saves time by using coding challenges, and the applicants involved get the opportunity to highlight their technical skills.
1.Concentrate on real time problems
Solving real-world problems for job prospects demonstrates their aptitude for the position and their potential impact on the firm. You might draw inspiration from your company’s past successes or current difficulties. These questions will be easier to understand than trickier ones. As a bonus, it will provide the candidate an indication of what they may expect to encounter on the job.
As a result, people can see if they are a good match for the job by doing this. Coding challenges of this type, which do not focus on the specific skills you seek or problems your company will face, are not a suitable fit for the assessments. The more specific & detailed the challenges are, the more likely you are to discover a suitable candidate for the position.
2.Use language agnostic challenges
Make your query more about business processes and less about abilities with specific programming languages as one of the best methods to implement coding challenges.
When you evaluate an employee based on their ability to respond to a business case, as opposed to something that they might easily get online, you gain a more accurate picture of how successful they are in their actual position. Due to this, many companies employ language-agnostic interview questions, which enable anyone who has experience programming to respond to the questions using whichever programming language they are most comfortable with.
3.Include pair programming as a screening process
Pair programming is an effective method for evaluating a job candidate’s ability to work with others. The ability to work well with others is necessary for a successful developer. During technical interviews, candidates’ abilities are evaluated using a method called pair programming.
The operation is as follows: Both the interviewer and the interviewee will use the same coding platform to jointly tackle a technical issue. The actual test takes forty-five minutes to complete. During this time, the interviewer or evaluator will lead the candidate through the process, but the candidate will be responsible for writing most of the code. They talk about the procedure, and each person has the opportunity to ask questions, offer their opinion, and express concerns.
The interviewers are able to better grasp the candidate’s coding abilities, as well as their ability to collaborate and communicate with others, through the use of a pair programming interview.
How to set up a coding challenge and evaluate
Before you begin developing a code challenge, you should first determine the objectives of the test that you will be administering. Candidates can be evaluated more quickly and objectively using goals, which are the simplest and most obvious method.
Determine the factors you will evaluate the candidates on, such as the following examples:
- Test Driven Development
- Domain Driven Design (or an object model)
- Design Patterns
- Clean Code
- Extensible code
Create an evaluation that is centered on the primary assessment goal. The questions that follow are designed to be of assistance to you:
- Which degrees of experience do we aim to reach?
- Which technological abilities do we intend to evaluate?
- Do we merely want to screen people, or do we also want to perform a comprehensive technology assessment?
- What kinds of skills can be evaluated mechanically with the use of auto-tests, and under what circumstances would a manual code review be necessary?
Utilizing a methodology that is centered on the candidate’s talents is the most efficient way to recognize unqualified applicants at an early stage. In today’s competitive job market, it has become a valuable tool for recruiting managers. You will not only save time by doing this, but you will also obtain a deeper insight of how your applicants think, how they solve problems in real life, and how they apply this to the roles that they are applying for. A traditionally human-centered procedure that is rife with bias can be improved with precision, efficiency, and a level playing field using automated interviews such as codathons.
Yaksha assessment can help you set up the industry’s best, tailor-made coding challenges and codathons for your organisation. It can also automate evaluations covering a wide range of programming languages, frameworks, and libraries – offering insightful reports on code quality and skill levels of the candidate.
Conclusion
In order to effectively hire developers, it is important to be able to offer coding challenges and codathons that are relevant to the desired skills set of the developer. Finding the right platforms to set up the challenges is equally important to provide a candidate-friendly experience as well as reduce the time spent in evaluation.
