Java Interview Assessment Test: Hiring Top Talent for Your Organization

A female programmer typing source codes for Java Developer interview in a coffee shop on her laptop

Often, multiple industries and companies seek developers for numerous projects. Currently standing, the demand for developers far outweighs the supply. Getting ahead of the competition and hiring the most talented candidates could make or break future company-wide decisions. Luckily, with a Java interview assessment test and data-driven technology, recruiters can quickly and thoroughly assess multiple candidates to weed out the good from the best. 

The Importance of Evaluating Your Candidate’s Java Proficiency

Understanding a potential employee's level of competency in Java is crucial. Since Java is one of the most popular programming languages among developers, with its code portability and versatility, the Java interview assessment test has been and will continue to be a key part of the hiring process. 

Being a beginner-friendly programming language, Java offers a variety of functionality and large-standing community support. Java is the primary source of technology for Android development. A project that requires a GUI or big data solutions probably includes Java development. Also, game developers mainly rely on Java because of its wide variety of open-source frameworks.

With a global language such as Java, companies can provide their projects with more compatibility and allow future development to further expansion. Having developers who understand Java is of crucial importance for the development of projects, past, and future. 

Creating The Java Interview Assessment Test

A Java interview assessment test is a technical test designed to evaluate soft and hard skills while determining if the candidate is the best fit for hire. Establishing a candidate’s knowledge and proficiency in Java programming can indicate how well-developed their basic programming skills and domain knowledge are. This process can be long, but by using online hiring platforms and breaking down the Java interview assessment test into multiple parts, businesses can efficiently find the technical talent they need. 

Skill Set Evaluation

By testing for skills and knowledge related to Java programming, companies can be confident that they are making the right hiring decisions. When giving candidates a Java interview assessment test, make sure to assess for these skill sets:

  • Technical Architecture Knowledge
  • Object Oriented Programming
  • Debugging Knowledge
  • User Interface Knowledge
  • Patience
  • Critical Thinking
  • Solution-Oriented Problem Solving
  • Communication
  • Perseverance

Soft skills are just as crucial for professional success in development as hard technical skills. Understanding if a candidate has these soft skills at their disposal can be challenging in such a highly technical interview. One of the best ways to determine a candidate’s soft skills is before the interview starts, with their resume. Resume screening not only determines the candidate's experience level but also helps interviewers pick out specific questions to ask during the interview. Unfortunately, not every recruitment team can assess all the candidates' resumes in a short period. The solution is to use artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial intelligence resume screening can create candidate profiles with the information it gathers from the resumes and provides it to hiring managers in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

Take-home Test

With the Java interview assessment take-home test, employers can identify the top candidates for the job and ensure they put their best foot forward in the hiring process. Take-home tests need to have a virtual platform that supports a variety of questions, including multiple-choice, multiple-answer, brief response, long response, coding snippets, and more. 

When most people think of long-answer or short-answer questions, most imagine writing. This format may be effective in a school setting, but candidates should present orally for interviews. Questions that are verbally answered can help interviewers determine the candidate’s level of confidence, communication, and knowledge better than a written answer. Of course, in a virtual environment, this is more difficult. That’s why having a virtual testing platform that supports recorded answers will be the best course of action. 

Timing is also an issue for take-home tests. Grading takes a long time when individual members of the recruitment team grade each one individually. Artificial intelligence can also automatically grade specific parts of the test to create an automated workflow and a faster hiring process. 

Questions to ask in a Java interview assessment take-home test:

  1. What is the difference between a JDK and a JRE? (Long response recorded answer.)
  2. Of the following answers, which best represents what public means in “static public void main”? (Multiple choice with one answer.)
  3. Which of the following are wrapper classes in Java? (Multiple answer questions.)
  4. What happens when ‘main’ is not declared at static? (Short response recorded answer.)

Live-Coding Interview

It’s important to implement a live-coding portion of the Java interview assessment test when testing candidates. Ideally, this portion would only include the few candidates who have proven they have the qualifications for the position. When implementing this, your recruiting team should conduct it over a virtual conference with a representative of your actual development team. This way, the development team gets a say in who joins their team and which candidate's personality seems to fit the team best.

When giving the interview, you should provide each candidate with the same integrated development environment (IDE). This provision is made because each IDE has separate features that could allow an advantage over other candidates if used. The Java interview assessment test should be fair and thorough to determine the best candidate. Nothing is more frustrating to candidates than an unfair assessment. It’s also important to provide a virtual whiteboard to the candidates before the assessment so they can plan out their codes and provide a visual representation to the team of their thought processes. These environments should then save all the material written by each candidate into their respective candidate profiles for later reference for comparison. 

The scenarios given to candidates should be pulled from real-life instances. This detail will give the candidate a better understanding of your company’s day-to-day workflow. It will also give the interview team a realistic assessment of whether the candidate can fit into the work environment and tackle realistic problems or not. 

Real-life scenarios to use for the assessment:

  1. Fix this code so it runs with the proper output.
  2. Create an online interface with sign-up, log-in, and sign-out options.
  3. Create a program that runs on the command line and, given an integer by user input, provides the factorial. 

Hiring The Best Candidate Faster With Filtered

The Java interview assessment test can be long and drawn out. Still, by using online hiring platforms and data-driven recruiting technology, your recruiting team can get ahead of the competition and hire the most competent candidates. If you’re reading this you’ve likely struggled to find a hiring platform that includes AI resume screening, take-home test environments that support recorded answers and code snippets, a virtual conference room specially designed for engineers, live-coding environments and virtual whiteboards, and candidate profiles. Luckily, Filtered can provide all these features and more for your recruitment team to follow through with a successful Java interview assessment test. 

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.