Picture this: You’ve got five technical hiring tools in place at your company, across three different teams. None of them has all the features you’re looking for. And none makes hiring simple for your resource-constrained teams. Despite the hiring team’s best efforts, their interviews and assessments still don’t match how software engineers actually work. So it’s not a great experience for candidates. And it’s not giving your engineers a very accurate picture of how those candidates would actually perform on the job.
For technical hiring teams today, this story is all too familiar. Instead of making your lives easier, your company’s technical hiring tools end up working against you. This can happen when a tool or platform fails to capture the full breadth and depth of candidates’ job-relevant skills—or isn’t designed for technical hiring at all.
Luckily, a better way is possible. It starts by looking out for four key red flags when choosing a tech hiring platform. Here’s what to watch out for:
🚩 Unintuitive environment.
An integrated development environment (IDE) that’s uncomfortable, unintuitive, glitchy, or lacking the expected features, means that candidates will need to spend time figuring out how to take your assessment rather than focusing on the questions. This can result in candidates feeling frustrated—or worse, like they weren’t given a fair shot to demonstrate their skills.
For companies, this can lead to a higher candidate drop-off rate, with qualified candidates opting not to continue in your process. Another potential outcome: false negatives. Candidates who have the required skills may perform poorly on your assessment due only to the difficulty of using a bad platform.
🚩 No features for assessing job-specific skills.
Many tech hiring platforms provide a basic coding environment, but lack the full functionality that engineers and developers need to build real software. Many cloud-based IDEs do not provide candidates with essential features like terminal access, fully functional autocomplete, or debugging tools.
They may also lack tools that are specific to specialized technical roles: live frontend preview for frontend developers, or Jupyter integration for machine learning engineers, to name a few. Without these features built into the platform, hiring teams can only assess a fraction of a candidate’s job-relevant skills.
🚩 Doesn’t integrate with your hiring stack.
Recruiting teams rely on a variety of tools to manage their candidate pipelines: scheduling automation tools, sourcing tools, and (of course) an applicant tracking system (ATS). When a tech hiring platform doesn’t integrate with your company’s ATS or other key recruiting tools, the result can be inefficiencies across your entire tech recruiting process. This is particularly impactful if your recruiting team has been downsized.
🚩 Only handles one part of the interview process.
If your tech hiring platform only handles take-home assessments, or is only useful for conducting live coding interviews, your hiring teams will find themselves burdened with juggling multiple tools. Using separate tools for assessments and interviews means double the time to configure integrations and learn the tools; it also means your hiring teams can’t easily review a candidate’s assessment results during the live interview. For candidates, using multiple tools provides an inconsistent and poor candidate experience that requires them to learn and perform within different coding environments.
Tech hiring platform must-haves
A stronger tech hiring platform will provide candidates all the tools and functionality they need to code like they would on their local machine. It will also allow your hiring team to accurately evaluate for all the technical roles you’re hiring for.
Here are the must-haves for an effective tech hiring platform:
- Uses an advanced, intuitive IDE that simulates real-world software engineering work
- Enables role-specific assessment with features like a built-in terminal, live front-end preview, and mobile device emulator
- Integrates seamlessly with your existing hiring stack
- Includes solutions for top-of-funnel skills assessment, full-service technical screening, and live on-site interviews
Want the full list of tech hiring platform must-haves? Download our Technical Interview & Assessment Buyer’s Guide, which includes everything you need to know for evaluating technical interview and assessment vendors—including a free downloadable RFP template.