Technical Interview and Assessment Solutions

Skills evaluation frameworks are at the heart of CodeSignal’s validated approach to designing technical assessments that is supported by IO Psychologists and assessment design experts.

A “framework” is a set of requirements and guidelines that define an assessment. The framework enables the test design team to create many different versions of a test that are similar in difficulty and topic area. These versions are highly consistent with each other in terms of key difficulty measures like solve rate, but dynamic question rotation mitigates the impact of leaked questions and prevents candidates from collaborating on solutions.

Offered only by CodeSignal, skills evaluation frameworks have 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 minimize the risk of candidates finding answers online.
• High consistency and validity between different versions of the same test.
• Validation and adverse impact studies that support EEOC compliance.

See examples of CodeSignal skills evaluation frameworks here.

A technical interview and 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 skills screening software powered by professionally-designed skills evaluations and a proprietary predictive Coding Score.

Tech recruiters and engineering hiring managers use a technical interview and 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 technical interview and assessment solution should be able to:

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

CodeSignal’s technical interview and assessment platform features:

• Highly consistent and valid professionally-designed programming tasks
• 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 interview and 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 interviews and 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 skills screening or interview coding challenge into their hiring process. This might look like a take-home assessment, a whiteboard assignment, or an engineering team crafting their own programming questions.

There are many problems with measuring technical skills in these ways. They often produce inconsistent measurements, are not EEOC-compliant, and programming questions often get posted online – among other problems. That’s why working with technical skills screening companies with expertise in assessment design is critical when implementing and designing pre-employment testing solutions.

At CodeSignal, we use skills evaluation frameworks, which create recipes for what skills we are measuring and how we are measuring them.

Some benefits of skills evaluation frameworks:

• An extensive library of thousands of programming questions, 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

The CodeSignal Assessment Research team works directly with our customers to consult on the overall assessment design and ensure that the questions you ask align to the roles you’re hiring for.

CodeSignal has turn-key questions that take care of programming assessment design work for you. Our questions are developed based on the CodeSignal research team’s skills evaluation frameworks and calibrated based on robust sample data. Additionally, all of our role-based question sets go through a rigorous validation and adverse impact study. You can rest assured knowing that your evaluations will produce accurate and consistent results that you can use to make your hiring decisions.

Another benefit of using skills evaluation frameworks is that they dramatically reduce cheating. 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.

We recommend using our research-backed and validated question set for early career talent through CodeSignal Pre-Screen 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, candidate results are 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. The Coding Score brings context around the particular test-taker’s programming skill level against the global developer population. This allows you to easily understand the candidate’s skill level and decide whether they are the right junior engineer for your team.

The biggest difference between CodeSignal and other coding assessment platforms is our use of skills evaluation frameworks in developing technical interviews and assessments.

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

• Design highly consistent, well-researched tech screens and assessments that are human-supported and computer-scored
• Deliver reliable interviews and assessments via a state-of-the-art platform
• Receive candidate Coding Reports in a matter of minutes, not days
• Analyze results in comparison to the rest of the developer population

We’ve invested heavily in our programming assessment design research to develop coding tasks for interviews that produce consistent and accurate results. Our skills evaluation frameworks minimize the risk of cheating and are 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 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.

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: Industry Coding, General Coding, JavaScript, Java, Data Analytics, or Data Science. They solve a variety of coding challenges at variable difficulties in a given time, and 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 and hiring managers 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.

Pricing for CodeSignal varies depending on the scale of your technical recruiting efforts. We will work with you to understand the hiring goals you want to meet, as well as challenges with your current process. Based on those, we recommend a custom package that fits your exact needs.

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