3 Benefits of Coding Tests and Assessments during Interviews

When you’re hiring for jobs where coding skills are required, it’s important to find a way to assess how much the candidates know. If you want to be sure about their abilities, questions and answers are not enough. It’s important to gauge their skills levels with an actual coding assessment test.

However, some people still doubt whether coding tests and assessments are worth the time and investment. Do they really add value to the hiring process? Find out when you continue reading.

1. Get a Grasp on the Candidate’s Thinking Process

The whole point of testing interviewees’ coding skills is to see how well they can evaluate the problems that they’re given and determine the best way to solve them.

With coding assessments, you can see how well they can analyze the problems and determine what to do next. Coding tests eliminate the guesswork and allow you to better understand the candidate’s thinking process.

It is rare to identify a candidate’s thinking process, but you can discuss how they work in an interview after you’ve gathered the test results. You can let the candidate guide you through the process of how they completed a test so you can identify if their style will work well with how you do things in the company.

2. Take the Candidate Out of Their Comfort Zone

Usually, candidates are much more confident in their natural environment: their homes, their schools, and their workplaces. Outside of their comfort zones, however, candidates can lose their self-confidence and start second-guessing themselves and their skills.

Coding assessments are exactly the same. They take the candidate out of their comfort zone. They force the candidate to solve the problem with limited information and guide them little by little towards the correct solution.

For instance, a candidate might prefer to write code on paper or a whiteboard. A candidate might be uncomfortable working on code without access to a search engine for double-checking.

This testing option opens the discussions to what an ideal work environment would look like for a candidate and if it would be a match to what your company can offer.

3. Measure the Candidate’s Skill, Not Their Potential

In a job interview, candidates can lie and show off their best skills. Coding tests are different. They measure their skill level, not their potential. You need your job candidates to have the right skills, not just the potential to develop those skills.

Yes, companies offer training opportunities to help employees become the best they can be. But if you can be given an option to start with an expert, you should grab the chance. On the flip side, you should also observe if the candidate shows an eagerness to learn, as programming is an industry that keeps evolving and changing, too.

Final Thoughts 

Coding tests are very effective at assessing problem-solving skills, but they are only effective when they are designed correctly. When you use the right assessment software, you’ll be able to create coding tests and assessments that will help you gauge more than just the technical skills of the candidate. Watch out for the second part of this post!

If you need a coding assessment test software, check out Kandio today. Kandio is a tool your hiring team can use to evaluate the technological knowledge of applicants and team members. Book a demo to try it out for yourself!