Technical Assessment: Why Technical Assessment is Must for Hiring Developers? The technical assessment is one of the most essential steps when hiring developers. According to a survey conducted by a prominent website, it was found that approximately 60% of the recruiters faced difficulty when hunting for a sufficiently qualified candidate. Due to a lack of technical skills, the majority of these recruits were found to have an inefficient KRA (Key Responsibility Area).
Unsurprisingly, the remaining 40% recruiters assessed the technical skills of developers and, hence, found it relatively easy to recruit the right individuals.
You can refer the following pie chart to get an idea:
So, will you dare rely on the developer’s resumes alone? Of course not. Leap of faith and other such things are best reserved for supernatural phenomena.
Having said that, we must also present the other side. Many developers are not so good at selling themselves in the job market. As a recruiter, you may end up missing out on some great applicants merely because they failed to stand out on paper.
Additionally, you are not supposed to pin your hopes on the tempting resumes as they are self-reported and unreliable. You may end up facing extreme disappointment with someone who doesn’t live up to your expectations. Usually, when someone promises something too good to be true, they are lying – it’s that simple!
There is a great variety of options or assessment techniques through which you can judge an applicant’s skill set. But technical assessment will hit bull’s eye. It is the most accurate and precise technique among all assessment methodologies.
The job of a recruiter is to assess and retain the best talent for the respective position. Evaluating the initial credentials of an applicant is pretty much straightforward. However, accessing technical skills can be a totally different ball game. Every organization is in need of employees with sufficient grasp over complexities, which, many times, tend to get complicated.
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When hiring developers, finding the right person for the role isn’t always as easy as checking qualifications and hobbies on the resume. Technical functions such as coding require superior understanding. And the techniques to check such understanding need an equally precise understanding, if not more.
A company’s culture is not limited to a bunch of talented individuals going about their own tasks. What matters, in the final analysis, is the ability of all such individuals to work together as a team towards the ultimate objective – of the project, of the division, and of the company.
5 Reasons Technical Assessment is Must for Hiring Developers:
It doesn’t matter how tempting their resumes are. If they lack basic technical skills then they are of no use for your organization. As the world is moving towards an increasingly digital platform, the level of technological complexity is rising to never know before heights. So, if the applicants are hired without technical assessment, they will spend more than the stipulated time on the project.
Time is money and a missed deadline can be a reputation killer. Ultimately, your organization will fail to achieve its goals within the allotted time.
It is really tough to judge the knowledge level of an applicant on the basis of theoretical questions. A test based on practical level coding skills can enable you to check the actual performance of the candidate in real work conditions. Live coding is probably one of the toughest and most challenging tasks that developers can encounter in the hiring process.
Such tests are often criticized because it is very difficult to think, code and communicate in the presence of the interviewer. But from the recruiter’s point of view, live coding is a valuable source of information about the candidate’s technical skills, other subject related knowledge, logic, and presence of mind.
It allows the interviewers to see, in real-time, how the applicant will perform on their own if and when the applicant starts operating for your company after being hired. When you are conducting collective interviews, a live coding assessment will also allow you to test the communicative and collaborative skills of the applicants.
Now, the main objective of such tests is to provide a correct answer to the question in the shortest amount of time. The secondary purpose of this task is to check the candidate’s attitude. Interviewers may be interested in checking the type of questions that the applicant will ask them before rushing into solving the code.
When writing codes for a project, developers often need clarifications. If they assume things or are too shy to seek elucidations, the final code may be full of errors. Precisely why the correct attitude is such a critical requisite.
The technical assessment allows the interviewer to check the amount of time taken by the applicant to write optimized code. The applicant should do the same in a relatively short amount of time.
Time taken by the candidate is a measure of his or her technical capacity. A challenge is never a challenge when you have all the time in the world to complete it. A candidate who writes the code in too short a time is either a genius or one overly confident of his or her abilities. By the way, there are few geniuses around. And a candidate who takes too long is either slow or incompetent.
Choose someone who delivers the correct code within the deadline you have provided. There’s no point in going for someone who is fast but leaves behind too many bugs. Neither should you go for someone who takes ages to deliver an error-free code. Trading along the middle ground has many benefits. Recruitment is not very different.
Merely getting the code right is just one piece of the jigsaw. The process is equally important, if not more. And how do you verify if the candidate has followed the right process? By checking logic!
You can cross-question the candidate’s answers and ask the logic that they have applied to arrive at the final code.
High attrition rates can be a business killer. It affects the continuity of projects as also the expenses associated with recruiting and onboarding employees. The technical assessment is one of the ways using which you can reduce recruitment hassles and costs to a bare minimum.
Of course, this is only a necessary condition at best. In order to make it sufficient i.e. to retain employees, you will have to combine technical assessments with other measures such as appropriate packages, other incentives, and inclusive work culture.
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