The last leaves are falling off the trees, days are getting shorter, and the Northern Hemisphere prepares for winter. Unphased by the changing seasons, DevSkiller has been working hard all year long to bring new features to the platform. Our goal is always a better platform and a better experience.
DevSkiller platform update November 2018
Here are some of the most important new features we’ve added since last June:
1. AI benchmarking helps you find the best candidates
AI has been a transformative force for most industries. Technical recruitment is no exception. It has touched everything from sourcing to interviews to negotiations. And now there’s an AI which can help you pick your candidates.
Devskiller’s AI Benchmarking Engine takes a sample of your past candidates and uses our machine learning algorithm to better understand what qualities make somebody qualified. It also compares the candidate to global results on our platform so you can see how well they do when you put up against every candidate being recruited. So how does this help?
While it won’t replace your own judgment, we found that our AI benchmark engine can predict whether a candidate will be chosen with 85% accuracy. This will inform your decision and speed up the process of selecting candidates.
2. Candidates can now check their results
As we have discussed elsewhere on this blog, a major component of a good candidate experience is giving regular, detailed feedback. And that includes how candidates did on their skills test.
To support the information flow between recruiter and candidate, recruiters now have the option of adding a link to the candidate report (sent witht he “send feedback feature” that they can send to the candidate. With this information in hand, the candidate can check their results, see what they did well, and discover what they can improve.
Even if you don’t end up picking a particular candidate, it is valuable to give them detailed feedback. This kind of feedback during the technical recruitment process will leave the candidate with a good impression of your company. This will make them more likely to reapply to other more suitable positions or refer other candidates to your company. One of these referrals could be the candidate you actually hire.
3. One test to rule them all
One of DevSkiller’s great features is that you can split your account into multiple teams who act independently. This means that one team’s recruitment efforts wouldn’t get confused with another one’s.
But after all, anyone who works on a recruiting team knows that sharing information is vital to developing a competitive edge. To facilitate this, we’ve made it easier to share tests across teams. You can now share tests from one team with any other team in your company. This can all be done without having to clone a single test.
Sharing tests between teams open up the possibility of having a team who just creates a test that then distributes it to the other teams. Additionally, if you find a mistake or want to make an enhancement to a test, that’s then automatically improved for every team in the company.
4. Company managers can now change all their users’ email addresses
If you were managing a large team, it’s essential to be able to swap users in and out as you need to.
To make this more easy for company managers, we now let them change the email address of all of the users in the company. This is just another reason it is easy to manage a large team of recruiters on the platform.
5. Screen recording has gotten even better
When you give a developer a test, you don’t just want to look at their solution. After all, two people can come up with the same solution to a problem in wildly different ways. The thought process and decisions that one person makes could be radically different from another. If you have that information, it can inform whether the person is a good candidate for the role you are trying to fill.
DevSkiller prides itself on presenting a natural environment in which to test a developer’s skills. And it is integral to our RealLifeTestingTM methodology that developers have access to all the resources that they would normally use at work. That could be anything from Stack Overflow to Google. This is because it’s important to see how and when your candidate uses these resources, just like they would at work.
To make it easier to understand the candidate’s process, screen recording now lets you see if the candidate has clicked out of the tab that they’re in. This way, you can see when they’re solving problems on their own and when they’re accessing outside resources.
6. It is now easier to add to tasks
One of the great things about DevSkiller is that you can use your own code base to test candidates. And now we’ve made it easier to create your own tasks. You no longer have to leave your exam to edit or create new tasks. This means that if you are building a test and realize that you want to make a new or modify an existing programming task, you can do it right then and there.
Additionally, our new draft state for tasks build outside of tasks means you don’t have to save the new tasks that you’re working on. This means that nothing gets lost. It allows you to focus on what’s most important, speaking directly to the best developers.
7. You can now test QA testers
We all need QA testers to speed up the process of writing bug-free code but who will test the testers? Now you can. DevSkiller’s unique testing engine means that you can run entire applications. This allows our QA tests to feature ready applications that the candidate can add unit tests in Cucumber, Spock, and JUnit. This is the same work that a QA tester will be doing for you, so the test will give you a deep insight into how well they will perform their job.
8. Ask security candidates to hack a real website
Testing for security vulnerabilities requires the mindset of a hacker. So to see if your candidates have what it takes, you need to see how well they can hack a site.
Devskiller’s new security tasks do just that. The tasks require the candidate to find a certain piece of secure information. For instance, it could be a list of user emails like the completed task below.
They are then given a fully functional website that they need to probe for security vulnerabilities to exploit. You can then see how they approach the problem to find the weaknesses in the site, just like they will in the role.
9. DevSkiller now integrates directly with SmartRecruiters
We have made it even easier to use DevSkiller tests with SmartRecruiters as your ATS.You can now integrate SmartRecruiters with your DevSkiller account. Our simple API access means you can send tests given on your DevSkiller account, using your DevSkiller credits to SmartRecruiter’s seamlessly. This means you can use all of the features of DevSkiller and not have the hassle of paying for each test individually.
10. New support for .NET core
.NET is one of the most popular technologies tested on our platform using the Mono engine. Our new support for .NET core means that you can test developers on the full extent of the .NET framework. This means that you can now test developers on cross-platform applications and microservices, all using the .NET framework.
11. We keep adding new programming tasks
Devskiller‘s platform is based on realistic programming tasks that would perfectly fit the work of a professional software development team. To keep up with demand, we continue to expand our programming task library with in-demand technologies like,
- C++
- iOS (Swift, Objective C)
- Python (Django, NumPy)
- Blockchain (Solidity, Ethereum)
- Android
- Javascript (React, Redux)
- Jenkins
- Security
- Golang
- Java (Kafka, JUnit)
- Kotlin
- CSS/HTML
- Cucumber
- .NET
