Programming interviews are a big part of the hiring process and can be quite stressful for job seekers and interviewers. As a candidate, there’s no way to be sure what challenges you’ll face during an interview or how well your skills match up with the position you’re looking for.
As an interviewer, it can be hard to know whether or not the candidate will be able to perform well on their next project after only an hour of an in-person meeting with them. Additionally, companies need to hire only the most qualified candidates for their business in the competitive market.
Companies have started using a coding interview tool for programming interviews to achieve this. A coding interview tool is a cloud-based software that helps companies conduct programming interviews and evaluate potential candidates’ performance by providing reports based on their code snapshots.
These tools help you conduct an online coding interview and also enable you to share your test questions with anyone anywhere around the world. This way, you get access to the best programmers who can solve complex programming problems within a short period of time.
If you are new to these coding interview tools, this article will help you seamlessly conduct programming interviews using those tools.
Get started by creating a challenge
The first thing you should do is pick the programming language you want to use in the challenge. There are many popular languages to choose from, but you should consider the job you are hiring for and what they use in their code base.
For example, if your company uses Ruby on Rails and you want to ensure that candidates can write good tests for it, then choose Ruby as your language. This mustn’t be obscure or esoteric; it should be one of the most popular languages at your company or an industry standard.
Add hints and notes
Add hints and notes so you can see how well each candidate solves the problem without seeing what they’re typing into their IDE (integrated development environment). Hints are helpful for candidates who have not had experience with a certain technology or language and need extra support. Add test cases, so candidates have guidelines for solving each issue.
Add notes if you want to clarify what you are looking for in a solution. For example, if you want the candidate to implement an API but don’t want them to create all of their data structures, then place that in the description of your challenge so they know, it’s not required (and so they can avoid spending time on it).
Review the candidate’s test after they complete it
When the candidate completes the test, you can review the results of their code in the live coding interview tool. This is a good time to look for cases where they didn’t complete something and cases where they got something wrong (e.g., they might have checked an if statement when you wanted them to check a while loop). It’s also good to check that they did everything in order and didn’t skip anything out of order.
Conclusion
As you can see, using a coding interview tool is a great way to understand your candidates better. Their skills thought processes, and ability to handle pressure is highlighted in the tests they have created. You can customize your tests with coding interview tools according to your company’s requirements.
You can ask them any questions related to programming languages that they have worked on before or even new ones. You get reports of the candidate’s performance and their code snapshots so you can make an informed decision about selecting them for an on-site round.
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