Online Coding Tests for Developer Recruitment and Selection

Selection processes for evaluating developers tend to be longer and more complex than for other professions. One of the particular difficulties in evaluating candidates for these positions is ensuring the candidate's technical competence. Written technical evaluations are traditionally used for this purpose, as well as technical interviews. Technical interviews are useful, but since they require valuable resources to be allocated, they cannot be applied to all candidates. Written tests are then used to pre-screen candidates, but these tend to present several problems.

Written tests to evaluate programmers are mostly questionnaires with questions to assess technical knowledge. The problem with these tests is that they are not very effective for measuring programming skills. Often the questions require knowing commands or expressions of the language by heart, which may prove some exposure or experience with the particular programming language being tested, but not skill with it. In fact, it can happen that a programmer has been working with a language for years and is very competent, but does not remember certain commands because they do not use them in their day-to-day work. It is a bit like wanting to know if someone is a good writer by asking them for random dictionary definitions.

This is where a tool for conducting online coding tests can make a big difference. There are platforms that allow candidates for developer positions to write code and be evaluated automatically, entirely online. For example, a question might be to write an algorithm that sorts an array from highest to lowest. The platform evaluates the code written by the developer in various scenarios and assigns a score. Since everything is automatic and online, it is possible to evaluate dozens of candidates with very little effort and thus pre-screen the best ones. With this type of test, it is possible to reduce a pool of candidates by up to 80%, so that efforts can then be concentrated on the 20% with the best performance.

This pre-filtered group can then go through the more traditional selection process to make the final decision. Although the use of platforms to apply practical online coding tests is not yet widespread in Latin America, they are widely used in the United States, India, and Europe due to their great effectiveness.

Evalart is one of these platforms, with support in Spanish (one of the few in the Spanish-speaking market that offers it) and in English. It is possible to try it for free for one month, up to 10 evaluations, and it also includes other types of tests useful during selection processes (English, personality, leadership, Scrum tests, among others). If you want to try Evalart for free for a month, you can do so now by following this link: Try Evalart Free for One Month.