Technical Interview Solutions
Reduce bias, save engineering time, and improve candidate experience to find and hire the best technical talent, faster.
Why Revolutionize Your Technical Hiring?
Find Qualified Developers
Pedigree is a poor proxy for skills. Broaden your candidate pool and qualify individuals based on their programming skills. Measuring developer skills accurately and at scale is easy with CodeSignal.
Save Engineering Time
Reduce hundreds of hours of engineering and recruiting time by streamlining the technical screening and phone interview steps to focus only on qualified candidates.
Reduce Hiring Bias
Screening based on resumes invites unconscious biases, whether it’s about gender, race, or pedigree. Build diverse teams with objective programming skills screens.
Products
Tech Screen
CodeSignal Tech Screen provides consistent and objective technical screens that give time back to engineers while delivering a white-glove candidate experience.
- Replace traditional engineer-led phone screens with Tech Screen—fewer engineering hours required.
- Reduce time to fill for senior-level and hard-to-fill engineering roles.
Pre-Screen
With CodeSignal Pre-Screen, you eliminate the need for a resume screen and identify skilled candidates early with our top-of-funnel assessment solution.
- Identify quality candidates from high-volume pipelines quickly and effectively.
- Predict a candidate’s on-site interview performance even before introducing them to your hiring managers.
Interview
CodeSignal Interview is a best-in-class solution for live technical interviews in a collaborative and realistic coding environment.
- Measure everything from algorithmic fundamentals to full-stack application development.
- Meet, talk, and code collaboratively with candidates with built-in video and audio calling.
Join hundreds of top tech employers that trust CodeSignal
Get Started Today
Ready to give CodeSignal a try and find out how you can revolutionize your recruiting process? Schedule a meeting with our team and we will get you started.
Technical Interview
Most jobs have interviews, but not all jobs require candidates to go through the interviewing process the same way. While certain jobs (such as retail and food service jobs) may only require a single interview to assess experience, skills, and personality, there are also many jobs in the more technical fields (such as engineering, science, or software jobs) that require multiple interviews. These positions can have as many interview rounds as they like, but the common number is two or three. If there are only two interviews, then there are often recruiter round questions and technical round questions. If there are three interviews, then it can be the recruiter round, technical round, and then team round. This last interview is not done by all technical companies, but there are some that want to establish a connection with candidates who have qualified through the recruiter and technical interviews and see whether or not the individual will work well with the current team.
But what is a technical interview? Technical interviews are commonly used by employers who are recruiting candidates for engineering and other technical positions. The technical interview process is a way of assessing a candidate’s technical skills and ability to perform well in the role they are applying for. These interviews are used by employers to assess a candidate’s problem-solving skills,communication skills, and how they handle pressure. These answers give employers an idea of how candidates would solve a problem at work, which is incredibly important for fields like engineering.
So, how do you conduct a technical interview? There are two sides to any interview — the candidate and the recruiter. Technical interviews can be given by the hiring manager themselves (or even by the team that the candidate would be working with if they were hired), but sometimes businesses will also use external or agency technical recruiters to administer these interviews. Whether or not a recruiter is actually giving the technical interview, it is crucial that they are able to connect with and understand top engineering candidates. To do this, they need to have at least a basic fluency of the technical terms that may be thrown around — such as programming languages, frameworks, libraries, front-end and back-end and full-stack, user interaction, user experience, DevOps, and more.
As the candidate, how do you know how to answer technical interview questions? Well, oftentimes these interviews are only offered to those who have the required education and previous experience, so it is likely that if you have reached the technical interview stage, you should be able to solve the problems that they give to you. The real key is to just go into the interview and solve the questions how you have learned to solve them. These interviews are to show the employer how you problem-solve and how you work under pressure. Trying an entirely new process is probably not the best option during one of these interviews. If you are worried about what questions may be given, you can do a web search for something like “what are technical interview questions for [position]” and insert whatever type of position you are applying for. This will help you to get the most applicable question sets and can help you prepare for the interview.
Technical Interview Software Engineer
Recruiters and hiring managers face many challenges when it comes to conducting interviews in more technical fields such as engineering. Here are a few of the most common challenges:
- Asking software engineer technical interview questions appropriate to the role
- Filling roles fast enough
- Spending too much time interviewing
- Ensuring question variations are equal difficulty so that candidates are assessed fairly and consistently
For this last challenge, think about it like this: if one candidate answers a set of software engineer coding interview questions that is wildly different from another applicant’s set of questions, it can be extremely difficult to effectively compare candidates’ answers.
In order to overcome this, it is important that hiring managers and recruiters create a consistent and effective structure that informs all interview questions. This allows you to really take into account the order in which you ask the questions, which can have an impact on your candidates’ performance. Now, with a structure for your questions in place, it can be even more important to ensure that your software engineering interview questions and answers are not being leaked. Unfortunately, with the widespread availability of online forums for developers, it is quite easy for information that shouldn’t be out in the open to get out in the open. But using a platform like CodeSignal can alleviate this risk by automatically generating millions of question variations. This ensures that candidates are not able to simply find the answers online and copy them, but rather work through the problem that is given to them.
Technical Interview Tips
Coming into a technical interview as a candidate can be extremely intimidating — especially if it has been a while since you have taken any sort of exam. There is a lot of pressure to do well on these questions; after all, the hiring decision is heavily affected by candidates’ performance in technical interviews. So, how can you prepare for your interview? The first and most obvious thing that you can do is look online for tips. You can do a search for “how to prepare for technical interview software engineer,” or even “software engineer interview questions reddit” if you are a Reddit user, and you are likely to have a sea of results that contain tips and maybe even a tech interview handbook PDF or two that you could scroll through for techniques.
Another option, and arguably a more effective option, is to look for a technical interview preparation course or practice program. For example, CodeSignal offers a free platform for practice interviews that allows you to assess your own strengths and weaknesses, get comfortable with the format, and brush up on any skills that may be out of practice. You can create your own study plan, cover essential interview topics, and even solve real-world problems. Pair this practice program with a checklist that ensures you are prepared for your interview, and you should be interview-ready in no time. Your checklist should ensure that you have taken a practice assessment, know what language you will be coding in, have easy access to any documents or resources you need, have a strategy for time management, have eliminated any distractions during the interview, have had a good night’s sleep, and, of course, have decided what you are doing to celebrate once you’ve finished your technical interview.
Technical Interview Questions
Technical interviews are a lot of pressure for both the candidates and the interviewers. Especially when these interviews are done live, it can be incredibly intimidating to make sure that you are giving (or taking) the best interview you can. But, there are some tips for both candidates and interviewers that can help ensure that the technical interview questions (coding, engineering, computer science, or other technical field-related) and answers are up to par.
For interviewers, the biggest worry is the technical interview questions. Engineering interviews may have different questions than a computer science interview and these may both have different questions than another type of technical interview. Because of this, it is important to keep in mind the position you are interviewing for. But, more importantly, you need to know how to create a good interview question for candidates and how to run the interview itself. A good question will be open-ended, have layers of complexity, and draw from your experience.
For candidates, it is important to feel comfortable and confident with any technical interview questions computer science positions (or any other position you are applying for) may ask. This can be tricky because all technical interviews are different and company-specific. However, using a tool like CodeSignal’s platform, you can easily assess your current skill set and prepare for your interview. CodeSignal allows you to practice in a real-world coding environment, get your skills certified, and create a study plan for technical interviews that fits your schedule so you can be sure you are ready for any questions they send your way.
Technical Interview Questions And Answers
Like any type of test, technical tests — such as coding tests — have both advantages and disadvantages. Some of the common disadvantages of coding tests are:
- Requiring candidates to code in a hard-to-use, unintuitive platform
- Providing employers with a poor signal of candidates’ skills
- Leaked questions, increasing likelihood of cheating
- Candidate drop-off due to poorly written questions or tests that are too long
Whether a test is asking IT technical interview questions, engineering technical questions, or other questions, it is important for both the interviewer and the candidate that the questions are straightforward and clear. When it comes to technical interview questions, engineering interviewers can use skills evaluation frameworks that can serve as blueprints for the technical assessment but can include a variety of variables and versions of questions so that interviewers don’t have to worry about their IT technical interview questions and answers being leaked.
When it comes to how to prepare for technical interview questions, candidates need to keep in mind that this type of skills testing is available for them to better show their potential employers why they are qualified for the role. Rather than thinking of it as an annoying part of the hiring process, it can be best to approach the test as an opportunity to elaborate on their skills and impress their interviewers. These skills tests can also help to reduce the bias in hiring decisions, save time for recruiters, and improve the quality of hires as well.
Technical Interview Questions Software Engineer
Creating and conducting technical interviews for engineering or other technical positions can be incredibly challenging — especially because it is essential that these interviews help you to actually assess whether or not a candidate is going to be a successful member of your team. While logical reasoning interview questions for software engineers can be an effective way to show how qualified or not qualified a candidate may be for a position, scenario-based interview questions for software developers or engineers may actually be a more accurate way to do this.
The truth is, whether you are offering senior software engineer interview questions or entry-level interview questions, it can be incredibly difficult to ensure that you are asking the right questions. Simply looking at a software developer interview questions and answers PDF may be able to give you some inspiration into the types of questions or problems that could be useful, but solely relying on these software engineer interview questions and answers examples will only get you so far. A scenario-based interview can give you a better understanding of how the candidate would perform in the job because you are essentially giving them a test run. This is just like how musicians demonstrate their skills by performing. CodeSignal’s platform allows you to offer full-service technical screens without taking up hours of your engineers’ time. You can receive screening results back in just hours, which can help you to ensure that you aren’t losing your best talent to the competition because your interview process is too long.