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A-Definitive-Guide-to-Hiring-the-Right-Coder-with-Coding-Assessments

Talent Assessment | 10 Min Read

Coding platform: A definitive guide to hiring tech talent

Introduction

When a new tech position opens in a company, the temptation is to shortlist applicants quickly and immediately hire a suitable candidate. While organizations use varied hiring strategies to recruit for different positions on short notice, tech talent hiring is complicated. Recruiting candidates for data scientists, developers, and other crucial positions requires time and effort.

According to recent data released by Indeed, 86% of hiring managers explained that hiring technical talent is challenging.

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It is essential to identify relevant tech hiring and coding assessment tools that streamline the hiring process by:

  • Reducing time to hire: A coding assessment tool helps reduce the time to hire a candidate by efficiently shortlisting in the initial stages. The tool improves candidates’ experience by creating a structured process for hiring.
  • Ensuring quantifiable outcomes: With a coding platform, recruiters can receive quantifiable outcomes that are objective results based on facts and are verifiable.
  • Eliminating bias: The objective evaluation with a coding platform ensures an unbiased process of tech talent evaluation.

 


Understanding the coding platform

A comprehensive coding assessment platform uses MCQ tests and simulators to evaluate candidates’ technical competencies for different job positions, such as programmers, engineers, and database experts.

 

What are coding assessments?

 

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Coding assessments measure candidates’ programming abilities. These are utilized in tech recruitment drives and job interviews to understand candidates’ abilities in real-life situations. Therefore, these assessments include MCQs to evaluate expertise in different programming languages like Java, NodeJS, Python, etc.

Identifying candidates’ coding knowledge, attention to detail, and logical reasoning through these assessments help hiring managers find an optimum technical fit for different job positions.

 

Benefits of using coding assessments during the hiring

Quality hires:

Candidates who have demonstrated optimum coding skills in assessments have the ability to offer meaningful contributions to technical business projects. Hence, the comprehensive quality of hires improves during recruitment.

Reduced bias:

Coding assessments are objectively designed to measure candidates' technical skills, eliminating potential biases in the hiring process. Further, uniform evaluation of every candidate ensures diversity and equity in recruitment.

Skill validation:

By using coding assessments, hiring managers can check the authenticity of candidates' coding skills mentioned in their resumes. This validation is proof of candidates’ coding proficiency for the designated job position.

Saved resources:

Coding assessments help evaluate candidates' fitment in the early stages of recruitment, reducing the number of shortlisted candidates and improving the quality of the selected pool. This reduces the time needed to assess the technical fitment of the candidates in the further stages.

Accurate reports:

Coding assessments offer insightful real-time reports to understand hiring patterns and key tech skills that ensure optimum hiring. These assessments help identify the programming acumen and problem-solving skills of candidates for different job positions.

What is a coding simulator?

 

A coding simulator is an integrated development environment (IDE) utilized for real-time coding. This tool assesses the technical proficiency of candidates, offers them real-time feedback, and employs an interactive interface for writing and debugging the code.

 

Benefits of using a coding simulator during the hiring

 

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Precise results:

Coding simulators provide a real-time environment, allowing precise results for assessments. The questions are designed per the proficiency required for various job roles, and candidates are objectively and accurately evaluated for these profiles.

Real-time results:

A coding simulator offers real-time results helping recruiters compare and shortlist candidates with desired skills. It helps recruiters conduct pre-interview level stages in less time and ensure quality hiring for different positions.

Better engagement:

The subjectivity of the traditional tech hiring process and the time taken to shortlist candidates impact applicant experience and engagement throughout the recruitment process. With newer technologies like coding simulators, hiring managers can select relevant candidates based on key tech competencies and offers precise results. This ensures candidate engagement and improves their experience with the brand.

 


Key factors to consider when selecting a coding platform

Selecting a suitable coding platform for a streamlined hiring process involves various steps, like identifying key competencies and skills, exploring important integrations, and evaluating features.

 

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1. Identify job positions

 

Coding assessments and coding simulators are customized for different job positions. For example, hiring a back-end developer is different than hiring a front-end developer.

Therefore, identifying open job roles and relevant technical requirements is imperative for selecting a suitable coding platform. Evaluate coding skills needs, technology knowledge, interpersonal skills, language skills, etc., before moving to the next step.

Determine key tech skills

Determining essential tech skills for specific job roles helps ensure objective evaluation and accurate hiring. Identify the following:

  • What tech fundamentals are imperative? For example, languages like C, C++, Java, JavaScript, etc.
  • What technology skills are required? For example, AWS, Kubernetes, cybersecurity, etc.

 

2. Assess question library

 

The objective of selecting a coding platform is to evaluate candidates for relevant job positions. For this, it is necessary to have an updated library of questions, both MCQs and simulations. Hence, review the question library, and assess the accuracy, quality, and freshness of the suite.

Mercer | Mettl offers a library of 100,000 technical questions for various job roles, including front-end, back-end, full stack, and database development. These coding skills tests are prepared for experienced, fresher, and intermediate tech candidates in diverse roles. With auto-graded evaluation and insightful reports, hiring managers can make data-backed decisions.

 

3. Consider features

 

Evaluating the features helps understand the coding platform and its unique functioning. Some features recruiters must assess are:

a) Customization

A customizable coding platform, assessments and simulators provide the flexibility to personalize tests for different types of candidates.

b) Scalability

As companies grow, the coding platform should be able to support hiring and tech talent evaluation at scale. It should be able to manage multiple users and job roles simultaneously.

c) Reporting and analytics

Supporting the evaluation of multiple candidates for the final position with reporting and analytics helps hiring managers make data-based hiring decisions.

d) Objective evaluation

Evaluating multiple candidates at once is challenging, but ensuring unbiased evaluation is still necessary for efficient recruitment. A reliable evaluation process for every candidate with relevant levels of difficulty according to job roles is essential.

 


How Mercer | Mettl can help

Mercer | Mettl’s coding tests allow hiring managers to evaluate fresher and expert candidates for programming skills. These tests evaluate tech talent for 600+ skills, assessing their hands-on knowledge in the field. Hiring managers can utilize insightful reports to understand candidates’ efficiency and ensure better hiring decisions.

The Mercer | Mettl Coding Skills Test is a specific programming assessment to hire relevant tech talent for different job roles in organizations. This test is available for different job positions, such as front-end developer, back-end developer, database developer, etc.

The advanced coding simulators understand applicants through their compilation attempts, the language used, code errors, code complexity, and results. Progress is outlined to help recruiters evaluate candidates’ tech role fitment. Recruiters can also re-evaluate any candidates’ scores after auto-grading to ensure optimum selection.

Our coding simulators estimate the code’s accuracy through different parameters given below:

  • Customization: Hiring managers can select a pre-built coding assessment from our library or create their own question bank for a customized evaluation.
  • Code playback: The entire progress of the candidate is recorded through editors, like Sublime and Vims, to evaluate code correctness, the approach used, debugging mechanisms, etc.
  • Plagiarism: When evaluating multiple candidates, it is possible to receive plagiarized or AI-generated code. Mercer | Mettl has recently introduced ‘AI Sense’ to detect code created using generative AI models. This feature detects submitted code for AI-based plagiarism, ensuring test integrity. Further, the simulator also detects similarity in codes submitted by candidates using factors like code structure, identical lines, and other such parameters.

 


Conclusion

Coding platforms are valuable for gauging coding skills during recruitment and objectively shortlisting relevant candidates for interview rounds. This eliminates bias and time-intensive manual processes, streamlining recruitment for the hiring team. Hence, it is important to identify the tech hiring requirements of the business and select a suitable coding platform for flexible, accurate, and customized candidate evaluation.

 


FAQs

What is a coding test?

Why is a coding platform important?

What does a coding assessment platform do?

Originally published December 4 2019, Updated August 28 2023

Written by

Shirisha has been helping countless brands gain traction with her content. Her deep understanding of the education sector and sound knowledge of technical skills have helped her structure the most creative solutions for key stakeholders. Shirisha has also ghosted pieces for several industry honcho’s successfully published both online and offline. When she's not keeping up with the world, you're sure to find her catching up on bollywood stories or gramming for fun.

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