Best Developer Assessment Tools - 2023

There are several key advantages that talent acquisition teams can reap from using software to vet engineering candidates.  Some people ask, what is a tech assessment?  A technical assessment is a coding test that mirrors the real world work of a computer engineer at a company and asks the job applicant to complete a series of coding exercises in a developer environment that tests their skills as a programmer.  Like any pre-employment evaluation tool, it is meant to test an applicant’s likelihood of succeeding in a potential role.  However, there are specific benefits to this segment of online assessment platforms.

• Remote Interviews: If you’re looking to hire remote engineers, or cannot meet in person due to the restraints of COVID-19, virtual tech assessments are a great way to continue moving the interview process forward, along with video interviews.
• Engineer Time: First off, your engineering teams don’t have to spend nearly as much time in the earliest parts of the recruiting cycle. This means software engineers can spend more time coding.  In many cases, this increase in productivity is similar to a company hiring 10% more engineers.
• Better Hires: Your engineering team is no doubt brilliant, but are they the best interviewers?  How many job applicants do they unfairly disqualify in the early days simply because their specialty isn’t hiring.  Unbiased coding tests allow you to better asses your top job applicants through standardized interview questions that test skills in the programming languages you care the most about.
• Candidate Experience: Because your software engineer screens are now automated, you can evaluate a larger number of applicants.  This allows you to give more people the opportunity to go through the screen a show their coding skills beyond what is on their resume.

• Diversity Hiring: An engineering assessment tool evaluates skills objectively and isn’t biased by gender, ethnicity, age, nor educational pedigree.  This means the people who have the skills to do the job will make it to the next phase.
• More Signal: Generally speaking a resume is a poor proxy for how strong a developer is.  Coding tests allow employers to expand their pipeline beyond people who simply look good on paper.
• Easy to Get Started: Most of these vendors offer free trials to get started.  This means you can quickly understand the workflow for a given tool, and how it can impact your overall hiring process.  Our advice is to have someone from recruiting and engineering involved during any pilot or trial phase as both organizations need to buy into this initiative.

We strongly believe that online coding tests are a great way to streamline your engineering hiring while producing a meaningful return on investment.  That said, there are several misconceptions and pitfalls that we see from the talent acquisition community that we want you to be aware of.

• Screening, not interviewing: Engineer interview tools are great at screening candidates.  However, they are not a replacement for the actual interview.  You still need to understand how someone deals with conflict, compromise, communication, etc before hiring them.  Coding tools are merely the first step.
• Diversity: Make sure you understand how diversity candidates are scoring on the tests you are administering.  One vendor in this space found their tests were biased against female engineers simply because no females were originally involved in writing the tests.  Getting women involved in building the question set fixed this problem.
• Engineer buy in: Your engineering team needs to trust in these assessments.  If they don’t, this solution provides very little value as they’ll still need to spend time doing their own screens.  Educating the engineering team typically happens from a leader on the recruiting side.  Of course, there are hiring managers spearheading this change as well.  To ensure a successful buying and implementation of the product, get engineering involved when you are demo’ing/trialing the product.
• Fraud: Understand how the screening tool you’re using ensures that candidates are taking the tests themselves and not posting fraudulent scores.
• What’s tested matters: You have the ability to customize your coding tests in a way that reflects the specific programming languages and skills relevant to the job.  However, what idiosyncrasies are still being left out?  Maybe you only pair program, and need to test this.  Maybe there should be a psychometric part of this test, or specific aptitudes that need to be measured in addition to skills.
• Tool, not marketplace: These tools enable your recruiting to team to vet candidates more effectively.  But, they are not sources of candidates like a job board would be (although some of the best tech assessment vendors can help with sourcing).
• Don’t leave humans out: Just because you have a new way to vet software engineers doesn’t mean you can simply let your coding assessment handle all candidate interactions.  Like any pre-employment screening, you need to realize candidate experience is paramount.  Set expectations, sell the person on your culture, and overall just treat them as you’d want to be as an applicant.

Tech recruiting platform pricing is typically based on the number of interviews you’ll be conducting on a monthly basis.  We like this because the more interviews you conduct, the more value you’re going to get.

Pricing starts in the $50/mo range for companies who are just getting started with one req, and can grow into the 6 figure range pretty easily.  

Please note that these are ranges and are meant to give you a general idea of how much you might pay for your organization.  However, prices will vary depending on a number of factors including: the features you need, support levels, vendor you partner with, HRTech integrations, etc.

Also note that many of the best online coding assessment platforms have free trials.

Are you looking at multiple tech assessment platforms?  We thought you might be!  Our recommendation is to use a structured rubric to evaluate these tools so that you can make the right decision for your business after demo’ing a few of the platforms.  We put together the below spreadsheet so that you can keep track of your key criteria when looking at these engineer hiring solutions.  Our hope is that it allows you to make the best decision for your business!

You’ll notice there are a few suggested questions in this spreadsheet already.  In addition to talking to a sales person to vet these vendors, we recommend opening up a free account to play around with the code editor.  Setup a pre-canned screen for a data scientist or programmer, and see the process they’d go through.  Then, take a look at how screen applicants are presented to your hiring team.  

How does this stack up to other online assessment platforms you’ve looked at?  Does it give you confidence you’ll be able to judge an applicant’s programming skills?  What other interview questions can you embed into these skill tests?  Make sure you think about this both from the recruiting team’s perspective, and the candidate’s.

Andela is a fast growing company faced with a massive challenge - how do we efficiently find and hire the top 1% of developers across Africa at scale (they get over 4,000 applicants/mo!).

Maya Neria, Senior Product Manager, was in charge of figuring out how to replace a home grown tech assessment platform that wasn’t cutting it with a solution that would mimic the real world while also providing feedback to candidates.  After demo’ing over 100 solutions, Andela selected a tech assessment platform, Qualified, and moved forward with overhauling their developer screening process.

Andela now starts their interview process by sending applicants a study packet on Python/Javascript basics, tests knowledge of this packet via a simple quiz through Google Forms, and then moves candidates into the tech assessment platform.  Currently 15% of people who pass the tech assessment are hired.  Moving to a standardized platform has allowed Andela to save time, improve the candidate experience, and create a more objective scoring rubric for future candidates.

What is a developer assessment tool?

A developer assessment tool is a software platform designed to administer coding tests to candidates to see if their skills match the job reqs. 

Why use a coding interview platform?

A coding interview platform acts as a screening tool for developers. By testing different language proficiencies at the beginning of the talent acquisition funnel, hiring teams can narrow down their list of top candidates much faster. 

Can a coding interview platform help with recruiting?

Yes, a coding interview platform can greatly help recruiting efforts. In addition to saving time by pre-screening candidates, developer assessments can reduce bias by objectively testing skills, allow for remote interviewing, and give better signal on skills beyond what a resume shows. 

What different kinds of coding interview platforms are there?

There are different kinds of coding interview platforms depending on who you are interviewing. Some solutions are focused on the top 1% of software engineering talent, others offer more general coding challenges. Some focus on academic assessment, others on real world problems. It all depends on your company’s hiring angle. 

What features do technical assessment tools offer?

Some features of technical assessment tools include:

• Testing tools for all popular coding languages
• Interview recording
• Video calling
• Test customization
• Plagiarism detection 
• Note-taking
• Detailed stats and reporting