It’s pretty amazing that the CodeSignal platform is able to provide automated tests for such a wide variety of tasks, including front-end questions! But what if you’re more interested in giving the candidate a question that’s more open-ended, maybe one that doesn’t have just one definitive answer? For these kinds of needs, we suggest free-coding questions.
We technically looked at a free-coding question back in episode 11, when we were talking about test-driven development. This is a really suitable use case, since we’re asking the candidate to write their own tests, but we could also use this for questions that involve reviewing / editing some to meet certain standards, or generally when we’re more interested in the candidate’s reasoning than their final result. These kinds of tasks can also be used as a kind of coding scratchpad, providing syntax highlighting and code completion.
Free-frontend questions provide a quick way to present the candidate with a mockup image or description without particularly tight guidelines. This can be a good opportunity to see how the candidate approaches a front-end problem (eg: using flexbox, grid, or table layouts).
In both cases, these types of tasks can be used within the Interview tool as well, so that you can interact with their code, provide feedback, or simply observe their development. And either way, there will be a saved replay that can be reviewed later at your convenience.
