Scanning a resumé and a phone interview screening can both provide a lot of information. Yet the priority for the recruiter is to get a clear picture of the candidate’s coding skills. Phone screens can give you a lot of information as can a thorough scan of a candidate’s resume, but at the end of the day, you need to be able to determine what the coding skills are of your candidate. None of the above methods will give you that. To do that, you need a coding test.
An array of methods are available to do coding tests, from whiteboard interviews to algorithmic testing platforms. All these methods, for the most part, won’t enable you to make an informed decision. Whilst Data structures and algorithms form the foundations of software, they are not an integral part of a developer’s day to day job.
What it amounts to technically speaking is seeing how well they can move dirt when what you are after is gauging how they use the tools at hand to dig a giant hole before a pressing deadline.
Likewise, time is too precious to be testing their basic skills. It’s more useful to you to test how they use their skills and available resources in order to deliver efficient solutions on time. A work sample test is likely to be the best way to go about this. Here are the main factors to take into account when giving a Scala developer a work sample test:
- Do not only test their language skills but also what knowledge they have of the frameworks and libraries you use in your company.
- Rather than resort to multiple-choice questions, concentrate on the programming tasks
- Use real-life tasks on your own codebase as this will accustom your candidate to the work they could end up potentially carrying out.
- See the task as an average day at work. The candidate will, therefore, have access to all the libraries, frameworks, and general resources useable on an average day. Creating an amazing solution is key, not how well they memorize the facts.
Tests are delivered automatically; the candidate can be anywhere anytime in the world when taking the test out there later from anywhere in the world. The code, as well as the solution’s potential, can be assessed automatically. This makes for an effective insight into your candidate’s ability to do the job whilst being very convenient both for your staff and for the candidate at the same time. This saves your expensive developers from having to deal with recruitment and avoids the risk of losing candidates
