How to Improve Candidate Experience with Online Programming Tests

From years of connecting employers with technical candidates, we’ve reached a huge milestone: We’ve delivered over 4 MILLION online programming tests!

That number includes a wide variety of candidate locations, coding languages, and stages in the recruitment process. Facilitating millions of online programming tests in the interview process between hiring companies and candidates has taught us an enormous amount about creating positive candidate experiences. In our journey growing from hundreds to millions of online programming tests, we’ve gained developer insights into candidate preferences, expectations, and capabilities to help you improve your interview process. 

Here’s our top insights.

Candidates Perform Best in a Natural Environment

Technical interviews should measure how closely candidates’ qualifications match the requirements of the job for which they’re applying. Ideally, your interview process gauges how well a candidate would perform on a day-to-day basis. Traditional technical interviewing methods like whiteboarding and in-depth phone interviews only tell part of the story, and may not capture how a programmer codes in real life. Using Codility, hiring teams can send online programming tests to candidates to complete on their own time, from a location they choose.

This way, programmers have access to resources like: Gitbhub for developers, StackOverflow recruiting, or even Google Search. 

While doing online programming tests, they can educate themselves around the task at hand to better inform their approach.

And once they come onsite, hiring teams can use the Codility results alongside their technical interview questions to review the candidate.

Because Codility is language-agnostic, we also encourage candidates to choose their preferred programming language when tackling a test. We make sure that, whether your candidate completes their test in Python or C++, they’re graded objectively.

Candidates can also use their own integrated development environments, or IDEs, of choice and seamlessly copy and paste their code to our text editor. From the way the IDE works to the way the timer looks, our UI is built to feel more real-life and improve your candidates’ overall performance and enjoyment.

Oh, and don’t worry about cheating; we have a bunch of safeguards in place to prevent candidates from submitting the work of others.

Candidates Expect Transparency

Technical recruiting is about relationship building. Even for highly technical roles, it’s about people connecting with other people and creating respect between the company and the candidate. The same way candidates expect to hear back about moving forward or being rejected in a timely manner, coders expect to know how they did on coding tasks. Sending them their score breakdown, when it makes sense, helps them learn and improve for future interviews and gives an even better impression of your company.

It’s also just courteous, and candidates will appreciate that.

Imagine this: you reject a candidate this time around, but because you were transparent about your recruitment process and sent them their test feedback, they’re left with a positive impression and keep you in mind for the future. Impressed by the integrity of your technical recruitment process, they return a few years later with a stronger skillset.

You now have an A-team programmer on your doorstep. This wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t build that relationship through transparency their first time moving through your interview process.

Time Matters When Taking Online Programming Tests

Giving more time to candidates does not significantly increase the likelihood of them scoring higher on their online programming test. This might seem a bit counterintuitive; you might think that by relaxing time limitations, candidates have a better chance of working through those tricky problems. Or maybe by allocating more time, test takers feel less pressure from the time constraint and end up performing better. It turns out this doesn’t always hold true. The candidate either knows how to write the code to pass the test or they don’t.

Codility makes it easy for hiring managers to provide a reasonable length of time for candidates to complete tasks during the technical interview.

Too short… and even the best candidates won’t be able to excel.

Too long… and hiring managers may find it difficult to differentiate great from mediocre candidates.

While test senders can customize how much time to give, Codility provides default suggestions, informed by the millions of online programming tests already completed through our technical recruiting platform. Our research helps hiring teams avoid the headaches and mistakes of calculating how much time to give candidates to submit their solutions.

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve technical recruiting. Drawing insights from 4 million completed Codility tests helps inform our product roadmap and share our feedback so companies can improve their candidate experience. So far, we’ve learned a lot about how to provide an engaging testing experience that is both fair and memorable. 

Are you ready to improve your candidate experience and level up your recruitment process? Contact us today to learn how we can help!