Coding Assessment Tools: The Future of Technical Hiring

Virtual interview with hiring team and female candidate for an open tech position.

There are numerous coding assessment tools available for hiring professionals to utilize. Therefore, companies often purchase outside sources for these tools and end up not using them because they don’t reflect the necessities of the process or are too complicated for practical use. This scenario is why it’s best to research the coding assessment tools available for your hiring process before selecting the source. Here we’ll look at some coding assessment tools to find the right candidate for your open positions.

What are Coding Assessment Tools? 

Coding assessment tools are features for hiring professionals to utilize to make evaluations easier and more thorough. They are used in numerous ways depending on the specific tool. Hiring managers use them to assess multiple positions in the tech field and diminish the busy work of the hiring process, focusing attention on the actual evaluation. 

Different types of coding assessment tools:

How Do Coding Assessment Tools Help Evaluations?

  1. Evaluate Strengths and Weaknesses
    Coding assessment tools address key pain points in the hiring process. They emphasize strengths and weaknesses in candidates that otherwise get overlooked. For example, custom coding environments can test a front-end engineer's adaptability. It tests if they can adjust their skill sets to a new environment. In this instance, the front-end engineer might be used to a specific integrated design environment (IDE) but unable to adapt outside of it for skills like debugging (some IDEs have a debugging widget while others must be done manually). Without these custom environments, the engineer might just use the IDE they are most familiar with, and the hiring manager would not be able to determine their ability to modify tactics.
  2. Evaluate Niche Skills
    These features and integrations are also great for assessing specific skills and qualifications in certain tech roles. While every position is different depending on the company providing the position, there may be some unique tasks that your QA engineer will have to navigate daily that QA engineers in other companies may not. These coding assessment tools help evaluate niche skill sets that a normal hiring process would not.
  3. Can Help Save Time and Money
    Coding assessment tools can also weed out unqualified candidates quickly without wasting the hiring manager's time and energy so that they can focus on qualified applications. Tools such as automatic grading features and fraud detection help in these instances. Automatic grading features eliminate manual assessment, providing quality candidates to hiring managers. The fraud detection tools help determine if a candidate is copying and pasting code into the assessment. In that case, the hiring manager can move forward with candidates whose skills are tested honestly.

Using online employment testing tools can also help companies save time and money by not having to interview unqualified candidates. Candidate authentication tools can identify the candidate's identity before even speaking to them. 

Uses of Coding Assessment Tools For Different Technical Positions

As mentioned above, coding assessment tools can help accurately assess multiple technical positions. Although, how your hiring team chooses to use these tools play a part in determining the accuracy of the evaluation. If your team chooses questions and coding scenarios that would best fit an information technology specialist, then it won’t accurately assess a cyber security consultant. The position itself determines the unique use of coding assessment tools.

Female front-end engineer working on three screens within an integrated design environment

Front-End Engineer

A great use of coding assessment tools for a front-end engineer is determining their web design skill sets. Use a custom coding environment built for HTML and inline scripting (JavaScript) for this evaluation. Candidates can use a virtual environment to share their screens and go through a preconceived scenario written to explain their code.

QA Engineer

Quality assurance engineers will need coding assessment tools such as illustration demonstration environments for creating test scenarios. In this example, give the candidate a splice of code and have them use a virtual whiteboard to write out different scenarios in which they run through the code to find logic errors. 

Application Developer

An application developer will need a coding environment that can run code through different emulators. Have the candidates each change a widget's functionality and run it through different emulators to determine which software updates are compatible with the change. Hiring managers could have candidates test both native or hybrid versions of code. 

Systems Engineer

Systems engineers and other information technology specialists may need to write different bash scripts to automate various functions within an active directory. Test multiple candidates' abilities to write and run bash scripts with an automatic grading feature.

The Future of Technical Hiring

As the Information Age evolves, so will practices and procedures. Multiple hiring evaluations can benefit from the use of coding assessment tools. The pressure to find and hire qualified technical candidates is growing rapidly. Therefore, the future of technical hiring will heavily rely on the quality and efficiency these tools provide to hiring teams. Get ahead of the competition and implement coding assessment tools by Filtered. 

Filtered is a leader in skills-based hiring. Our end-to-end technical hiring platform enables you to spend time reviewing only the most qualified candidates, putting skills and aptitude at the forefront of your decisions. We’ll help you automate hiring while applying objective, data-driven techniques to consistently and confidently select the right candidates. To get started, contact our team today or register for a FREE demo.