Coding Tests and Assessments for Hiring at Scale

A technical skills assessment platform helps recruiters and hiring managers conduct pre-employment screening for technical roles efficiently at a large scale. Also known as a developer assessment platform, CodeSignal offers a cloud-based technical assessment solution powered by professionally-designed coding tests and a proprietary predictive Coding Score.

Tech recruiters and engineering hiring managers use a technical skills assessment platform to gain deep insights into candidates’ programming skills and abilities. Measuring coding skills allows them to make data-driven decisions, improve process efficiency, and reduces bias in recruiting.

A great coding potential assessment solution should be able to:

• Design highly consistent and well-researched technical assessments
• Deliver reliable tests via a state-of-the-art platform
• Analyze results in comparison to the rest of the developer population

CodeSignal’s Technical Skills Assessment platform features:

• Highly consistent and valid professionally-designed programming tests
• Advanced Cloud IDE supporting 70+ coding languages, frameworks, and libraries
• Predictive Coding Score

If you’re hiring engineers, having the ability to assess candidates’ technical skills enables you to create a fair and efficient hiring process that leads to the best candidates for the job. A coding interview tool allows you to create a data-driven recruiting process by focusing on abilities – not proxies like former employers or educational institutions.

A coding assessment tool can help tech recruiters and hiring managers at every size company – from early stage startups where every hire is critical, to large enterprises who hire talent at a large volume – go beyond resumes and assess technical skills.

Data-driven recruiting and technical skill assessments…

• Reduce bias and increase diversity
• Open up the candidate pool at top of funnel
• Save time by allowing you to focus only on qualified candidates
• Reduce skill gaps at an organization
• Increase quality of technical hires

Many organizations today have implemented some form of technical screening test or interview coding challenge into their hiring process. This might look like a take-home test, a whiteboard assignment, or an engineering team crafting their own programming skills assessment questions.

There are many problems with measuring technical skills in these ways. They often produce inconsistent measurements, are not EEOC compliant, and programming test questions often get posted online – among other problems.

That’s why working with technical skills assessment companies with expertise in test design is critical when implementing and designing pre-employment testing solutions.

At CodeSignal, we use framework-based coding assessments, which create recipes for what skills we’re measuring and how we’re measuring them.

Some benefits of framework-based assessments:

• An endless number of programming tests, which increases integrity of results
• Deliberate measurement to ensure accuracy and validity of results
• Coding Score that puts a test-taker’s performance in the context of the global developer population

TL;DR: Yes, we can!

Not only does CodeSignal have an extensive library of predefined coding questions, but the CodeSignal Test Design team also works directly with our customers to consult on the overall test design.

For fundamental programming ability and other common coding language skills, CodeSignal has a turn-key solution that takes care of programming test design work for you. Our Certification Tests are developed based on the CodeSignal research team’s testing frameworks and calibrated based on robust sample data. Additionally, all of our Certification Tests go through a rigorous validation and adverse effect study. You can rest assured knowing that your tests will produce accurate and consistent results that you can use to make your hiring decisions.

Another benefit of using framework-based assessments is that they are cheat-proof. Dynamic question rotation of a large question set ensures that studying our questions ahead of time is practically impossible. Add on top of that our advanced plagiarism checker, and you can trust that our test results accurately represent your candidate’s (not someone else’s!) skills.

However, if you are hiring for a specialized role and would like to create a custom coding assessment test, our professional test design team is here for you. Get in touch to learn more.

We recommend using our General Coding Assessment (GCA) through CodeSignal Certify to analyze junior engineer skills. This framework-based technical assessment software measures core programming fundamentals and computer science knowledge. You can also see an in-depth breakdown of candidates’ results; this includes the test-taker’s code-writing and problem-solving skills, as well as their ability to produce clean code at a reasonable speed.

Unlike other coding screening platforms, the GCA is measured using CodeSignal’s Coding Score, which acts like a credit score for programming skills and is highly predictive of a candidate’s performance on their on-site interview and in their job. Coding Score is computed based on our proprietary algorithm, and differs from the total test score you will also see in our developer skills assessments. It also brings context around the particular test-taker’s programming skill level against the global developer population. This allows you to easily understand their skill levels and decide whether they’re the right junior engineer for your team.

The biggest difference between CodeSignal and other coding assessment platforms is our assessment philosophy.

We believe that a great developer skills assessment solution should be able to:

• Design highly consistent and well-researched assessments
• Deliver reliable tests via a state-of-the-art platform
• Analyze results in comparison to the rest of the developer population

We’ve invested heavily in our programming test design research and pioneered the framework-based assessment methodology to develop coding tests for interviews that produce consistent and accurate results. Our framework-based assessments are also leak-proof and fully managed by CodeSignal. You don’t have to maintain the test by constantly creating new questions yourself.

We have one of the most advanced cloud IDEs, which supports 70+ coding languages, frameworks, and libraries. This allows you to test candidates for a variety of technical roles. Test-takers can write, edit, and run code as they do in a real development environment. The collaborative editing feature coupled with a video chat enhances both remote and in-person interview experiences.

Our assessment results analysis does not stop at automatically scoring the points, though. Our proprietary Coding Score is highly predictive of a candidate’s performance in later rounds of interviews and on the job.

This simple yet powerful metric enables non-technical technical recruiters to make data-driven decisions by being able to easily understand a candidate’s proficiency level.

CodeSignal’s advanced coding environment supports over 70+ coding languages, frameworks and libraries. In addition to the standard single-file interview coding challenges, we support filesystem-enabled coding challenges that simulate the real development environment. You can assess a variety of roles using CodeSignal such as full-stack, backend, frontend, DevOps, mobile, data scientist, and more. Here is the full list of languages and related libraries we support.

Coding Languages & Libraries:

We support a large selection of coding languages, including the widely used ones: Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, React, Ruby, Swift, and more. Here is the full list of languages and related libraries we support.

Unit Test Frameworks:

CodeSignal’s state-of-the-art IDE supports a number of unit test frameworks. Some examples include:

• NUnit for .NET Framework
• xUnit or NUnit for .NET Core
• JUnit for Java
• Mocha/Chai for JavaScript
• PHPUnit for PHP
• unittest for Python
• RSpec for Ruby
• UI tests using Galen
• UI functionality tests using Puppeteer

Coding Score is a measurement of a developer’s overall implementation and problem-solving ability. CodeSignal’s Coding Score is a credit score-equivalent for technical recruiting that measures programming skills on a scale of 300 to 850.

A candidate takes one of our framework-based coding assessments designed to measure a specific category of software engineering skills: General Coding, JavaScript, Java, or Data Science. They solve a variety of coding challenges at variable difficulties in a given time, much like the SAT. The test is then scored based on a variety of factors:

• Maximum average score (ms), which is the max score a test-taker will get by solving all tasks in average time.
• Maximum quiz score (mq), which is the maximum score a test-taker will get by solving only the quiz tasks (if any).
• Max variation (mv), which is how much the score may vary (from the score that a test-taker would get when solving that set of tasks in average time, without incorrect attempts) based on speed, code quality, and incorrect attempts.
  

The Coding Score obtained from the test is a singular measure meant to give recruiters, hiring managers, and educators (as well as the test-takers themselves) a quick view of the test-taker’s skills. It measures the test taker’s code-writing and problem-solving skills, as well as their ability to produce clean code at a reasonable speed.

Framework-based test design is a widely-accepted approach to designing high-volume assessments. Tests like the SAT, GRE, GMAT, and TOEFL are not created by picking a handful of questions from a question library. Instead, those tests are backed by a specific framework that lays out what the test aims to measure, how it measures it, and how it is scored.

The framework also acts like a recipe that enables the test design team to make many different copies of the same test. These “copies” are highly consistent with each other, but also prevent test-takers from leaking and collaborating on solutions.

Framework-based test design has many benefits over traditional developer skill assessments:

• No maintenance cost. Your engineering team doesn’t need to worry about designing your tests.
• Dynamic tests that can’t be leaked.
• High consistency and validity between different versions of the same test.
• No liabilities and validation studies that help support EEOC compliance.
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See examples of CodeSignal assessment frameworks here.

At CodeSignal, we first want to understand the data-driven recruiting process that you want to implement and your current challenges. Based on those, we recommend a custom package that fits your exact needs.

Schedule a call to request a demo, and let’s talk about it!