How to Plan an Efficient Live Coding Interview

 A coding assessment overlay the image of a computer on a desk

Job interviews are a nerve-wracking experience for everyone involved, but a live coding interview takes this pressure to a whole new level. Fortunately, interviewers can use a hiring assessment platform to ease the pressure and focus on what matters most during the interview.

Understand the Pressures of a Live Coding Interview 

During a live coding interview, it’s normal for a candidate to be nervous because their coding skills are being assessed with high stakes. What is not commonly known is that it’s also normal for an interviewer to be nervous. 

Interviews are essential for the candidate and the interviewer to give a good first impression. While it’s not new that the tech industry has been suffering from a lack of talent for the immense demand, they still consider this a large hurdle. 

Interviewers need to assess candidates' skills quickly and accurately while beating out the competition by offering the most qualified candidates their open positions faster. The interviewer must possess the same skills as candidates to identify and assess them adequately.  

How to Ease the Pressure of a Live Coding Interview By Planning Ahead

Planning for an interview can take longer than the interview itself. Hiring managers and teams must develop coding assessment scenarios, weed out unqualified candidates, and organize candidate information for comparison throughout the process. Therefore, hiring teams feel more pressure if they lack the necessary resources to plan accordingly. Fortunately, interviewers and hiring teams can implement a hiring assessment platform to ease the pressure and focus directly on their assessments and less on the tedious minutiae of the process. 

Use Specially Created Assessment Environments

Live coding interviews can be used to assess multiple positions. Front-end developers, quality assurance specialists/developers, and system administrators perform vastly different roles and have varying responsibilities. However, performing a live coding assessment for all these positions would be beneficial. Despite using a similar approach to assess these candidates, depending on the position available, the coding environment and scenario must be specialized. 

Virtual environments tailored for different assessments will raise the evaluation quality and test the candidate's true skills per the open position(s). 

Automated Grading Features

Interviewer manually assessing a candidate's test results in front of her.

It’s ineffective for the hiring team and the entire company to fully assess unqualified applicants and pass everyone onto the live coding interview. Doing so takes time out of the hiring process and wastes resources that could be useful for evaluating truly qualified candidates. The double standard of this issue is that to determine if an applicant is unqualified, you need to assess them. Using automated grading features on take-home tests saves time by cutting down manual grading and only elevating the candidates with the best test results.

Employ Artificial Intelligence for More Accurate Skill Analysis

It’s important to assess soft and hard skills during live coding interviews. Despite being seen as a logical skill, coding requires creativity and patience. Although these soft skills are fundamental, hiring teams usually focus efforts on looking for hard technical skill sets during live coding interviews and bypass the soft skills evaluation. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) resume screening can pick up on them before the live coding assessment and present each candidate’s soft skills. This way, hiring managers and interviewers know what to look for during the live coding assessment. 

Applying artificial intelligence during the hiring process can help take pressure off the interviewer. It will take away a small sum of the many responsibilities they need to worry about and accurately assess these skill sets.

Implement Real-World Scenario Assessment

It’s difficult for hiring teams to assess real-world job-related scenarios. They may not have the best equipment or coding environments to support the same scenarios given to on-the-job employees. A hiring assessment platform provides the hiring team with these environments for implementation. Emulating real-world scenarios gives managers a full understanding of where a candidate lands on the experience level. 

Record Output: Candidate Profiles

One of the hardest aspects of a candidate evaluation comes after the assessment. Suppose three candidates fit the requirements of the position perfectly. In that case, the hiring manager or interviewer will need to compare these candidates. At this point in the process, it’s important to be thorough and fast because other companies are also considering the best candidates. 

Hiring assessment platforms can create candidate profiles and log information during the assessment, making the information available immediately. These platforms can record live coding assessments and store the output of their code. This way, hiring managers can accurately assess the candidates' information as quickly as possible and offer the best fit candidate the position ahead of the competition.  

Live coding assessments are tricky for everyone involved, but they are easier with the right resources. Filtered provides the features and integrations needed to create a thorough and swift hiring process to find the best candidates for all technical positions. 

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.