5 uses for coding tests
There are a lot of uses for coding tests, beyond IT recruitment. Thanks to the flexibility of our system, programming assessments at DevSkiller can be used to meet various company needs— not only in recruiting tech talent. Just see for yourself.
1. Coding tests as a tool to streamline IT Recruitment
Programming assessment is widely used in IT recruitment. Although coding tests mainly support technical recruiters in a screening stage, using the right programming tests streamlines the whole recruitment process and brings positive effects on all other recruiting phases.
Some companies use coding tests as the first method of screening – they invite all applicants to solve a coding test and depending on their results, they continue the recruitment process. This lets you assess and filter candidates based on programming skills and their ability to solve programming challenges. This means you don’t have to only rely on what their resume says. This approach can also decrease the number of unnecessary interviews by up to 40%. As well as increase the number of quality candidates that get through to technical interview. Leading to a faster time-to-hire, which is crucial in IT recruitment.
Coding tests can be also used during the technical interview with your IT team. Instead of whiteboard coding, the candidate can be given a programming task to solve during or just before the interview, and then discuss the solution they submitted.
To know more about streamlining your IT recruitment process, check out our ebook—
Hack the process of hiring developers
2. Coding tests as an educational method used in programming courses and training (on-site and online)
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Programming is a very practical skill. In a developer’s world it doesn’t matter how much you know, what matters is what you can do. You need to be able to use your knowledge and skills to solve programming problems in an efficient and effective way. Coding tests can be a great teaching tool.
DevSkiller coding tests let you add your own online programming tasks so that you can structure them in a way that reflects your own programming course and training.
3. Use coding tests as a way to verify the programming skills of IT contractors
In IT you often have to operate within very tight deadlines. Tricky if you are suffering from a lack of developers. That’s when temporary outside help is needed and IT contractors come in. You can contract tech talents through IT staffing agencies, IT outsourcing companies (eg. IBM, Atos, Accenture), or look for them on your own through portals such as UpWork or Guru.
No matter which method you choose, your CTO or Senior IT programmer will have to verify an IT contractor’s skills. Experience and certificates don’t guarantee that the programmer will be able to do the job you are hiring them for. Strangely, IT contractor agencies don’t take responsibility for assuring the quality of such programmers. That’s where our coding tests can help.
At DevSkiller we let you prepare your own programming tests. These can be based on your company’s code and thus imitate perfectly, the IT ecosystem that the programmer will work in.
Apart from giving candidates a realistic programming task to solve, you can also verify their coding skills with a code review challenge.
4. Use coding tests as a way to verify employee growth and development
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Next in our list of uses for coding tests, is to use them to evaluate employee growth. The results a programmer achieved during their assessment can be used as part of their overall evaluation and serves as a benchmark for career development.
5. Use coding tests for programming challenges
Companies turn to programming contests for various reasons. It can be a recruitment challenge, an employer branding opportunity or a way to crowdsource a programming problem.
As a recruitment challenge – it allows you to test a lot of programmers at once or within a short period of time. You can contact the candidates that get the best score, invite them to interviews and potentially offer them a job. Some candidates find it very motivating to participate in such challenges to see how well they fare against other top coders.
Coding contests can also be used for crowdsourcing purposes. However, such an initiative requires a lot of branding and PR attention in order to lead the crowd in the right direction and keep the right level of motivation. You want the participants to be appreciated and not to feel misused.
DevSkiller TalentScore features that support the various uses for coding tests
a) Test knowledge of frameworks and libraries, as well as knowledge of programming languages
If a developer is familiar with the frameworks and libraries associated with a language, then they can use this to write code only where it is necessary, allowing their work to become much more efficient.
b) Build your own coding tests and use your company’s codebase.
Your custom coding tests will imitate perfectly the IT ecosystem of your company. The technical environment that the programmer will work in at your company. We’ve made our system flexible, so you can implement not one page of your code, but a whole system using frameworks and libraries.
c) Solving coding problems in a natural coding environment.
We are strong advocates of open-book exams and creating such an environment during assessments so that they resemble real-life coding challenges. For instance, we allow programmers to use their own IDE so that they solve coding assessments in an environment that is comfortable for them. We are strongly against using algorithmic tasks in assessment as they don’t serve as necessary proof of a candidate’s programming skills.
d) Code review as a way to assess a programmer’s skills
Apart from giving candidates true-to-life programming tasks to solve, you can also verify their programming skills with a code review challenge. This will help you evaluate a candidate’s familiarity with the design patterns and coding practices of a language, which is essential for keeping the code clean while working in teams.
Learn more about DevSkiller coding tests
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