An in-depth guide on technical assessments

‘‘Assessment is today’s means of modifying tomorrow’s instruction.’’ — Carol Ann Tomlinson

According to Statista, the IT BPM sector added 0.14 million to its numbers between 2020 and 2021.

And, the outlook for FY2023 (2022-23) is as optimistic as it was for the previous year, according to the NASSCOM Enterprise CXO Survey 2022. End-user enterprises are emerging as technology job creators with about 30 per cent of the respondents intending to increase their technology team by over 15 per cent.

The huge demand for tech staff has put hiring on centrestage, triggering a digital revolution in talent acquisition too.

Shortlisting candidates has moved from manual to digital to its current algorithm-based approach.

The next step in the hiring process, candidate evaluation is witnessing a wave of transformation too. What was once done manually is now happening on enterprise recruitment platforms that promise to make hiring decisions efficient and calculated for employers.

If you are a software engineer on the job market, then you would soon be on one such platform, taking a technical assessment of your prospective employer’s design.

If you are an employer, you will be on the lookout for candidates with the skills and competencies that match a role’s requirements. Thankfully, assessments are here to facilitate this recruitment process.

Significance of assessments: Finding the right tech-mate

Assessments are an excellent way to discern a person’s abilities. Their logical structure provides the necessary insight into a candidate’s aptitude for success in a specific role, thereby rendering them as effective tools that narrow down the applicant pool by filtering out unsuitable candidates.

The list above gives only a generic view of what can be evaluated with assessments. Each industry/function/role comes with specific requirements and to cater to the variety, there are different types of assessments.

Types of assessments: The tech gateway to test

Broadly, assessments are classified as either technical or non-technical.

• Technical assessments test knowledge, skills and aptitude. They also go by the names ‘role-based tests’ and ‘domain tests’. This is further categorised into two types: coding and non-coding.
  • A coding test evaluates programming knowledge and the abilities of candidates to address technical questions and complete tasks.
  • A non-coding test evaluates skills unrelated to coding. For example, it tests candidates for their domain knowledge in areas such Sales, HR, Supply Chain Management, Finance and Accounting
• Non-technical skill assessments check for compatibility-levels between a candidate and an employer. It evaluates whether the candidate is a good-fit for the organisation’s culture, beliefs, processes, structure and customs.

Now that there is a broad knowledge of the types of assessments, let us dive deeper into the main focus of this blog: coding technical assessments

Technical assessment: Identifying hidden capabilities

Educational qualification and technical competency are not always proportional. Sometimes, a candidate equipped with just a three-month code bootcamp training may have better coding skills than a graduate who has attended a four-year university course. How will you identify the better candidate?

This is where technical assessments come in handy. They measure a candidate’s proficiency by removing any other perceived good influences and affinity biases.

The market is flooded with tools that boast of various features, all of which are meant to ease the recruitment process and save time and resources.

The tools have capabilities to conduct tests for hundreds of programming languages, offering recruiters the flexibility to choose them like a package grouped either by skills or technology. Hirepro, India’s leading talent acquisition solution providers offers these:

But before administering a technical test, consider some of these things:

• Design an assessment that is role-relevant and has task-specific questions
• Give candidates a heads-up on what they are about to face so that they come prepared
• Where needed, use both coding tests and technical interviews
• Put to optimal use the tools that recruiting agencies are offering

Online assessment tools: The tech toolkit

Coders are in high demand. According to Glassdoor, 32 per cent of job vacancies are tech-related. However, employers are struggling to fill these positions. The situation calls for a revolutionised approach to hiring that can assess, monitor and save valuable resources for a recruiter.

The AI-powered coding assessment tools have these two main features:

• Coding assessment platforms

  To evaluate whether a candidate has the technical knowledge that he/she claims can be a laborious task. Using the specialised features of coding assessment platforms can simplify this task greatly. Features that are offered include:

  • Coding assessment formats (objective type, caselets)
  • Coding simulators
  • Coding interview platforms
  • Case study simulators

• Proctoring technology

To maintain honesty and integrity throughout the assessment period, robust, AI-powered technology is deployed to conduct secure, online assessments.

Benefits of using assessment tools

With emphasis on speed and accuracy, recruiters will inevitably turn to digital solutions. Here, technical assessment tools can be leveraged to widen the hiring funnel and process more inbound applicants.
Apart from nitty-gritties such as customised email invites, selecting welcome screen for candidates, setting time limits, fixing qualifying scores etc., assessment tools have these weighty advantages to offer:

• Identification of a candidate’s practical skill-set:

It is one thing to hold a certificate, quite another to be able to apply that knowledge. While the former speaks of learnability, the latter is about application. Technical assessments show just how much of a gap there is between the two.

• Substantiate quantity of soft skills

It is a misconception to think that technical assessments do not give much insight into a candidate’s soft skills. These tests are designed to also test a candidate’s problem solving ability, creativity, patience and perseverance.

• Gain high quality insights

Technical assessments are AI-powered, so their analytics can generate reports at a high level as well as granular level. The reports help to identify top performers at a glance, and also offer insights about every candidate’s performance and code-quality.

• Enhance hiring accuracy

Hiring is a complicated process and hiring right is even more so. The emphasis that recruiters lay on finding the right-fit is not unwarranted. It is, in fact, in the best interest of both employers and prospective employees. With employers wanting to optimise their ROI and employees wanting to be challenged just enough to stay interested, technical assessments take on the role of match-maker between the two.

• Hire without bias and discrimination

Unfortunately, humans are predisposed to fall into the trap of unconscious biases, which can inadvertently impact decision-making while hiring. Technical assessments, on the other hand, are impersonal, impartial and undiscriminating. This renders the selection process objective.

• Accelerate hiring process

Technical assessments are conducted much faster, with more accuracy and objectivity than traditional testing approaches. They remove hunches from the hiring process and thus shorten the time between first contact and first day at work.

Above all, hiring decisions can now be transparent and scientifically backed.

Conclusion: Leveraging tech for precise evaluation

In a digitised world where technology keeps disrupting and advancing at a rapid rate, top technical skills are always in demand and HR professionals find themselves at the forefront of the ‘talent war’.
To screen huge volumes of inbound applications is no mean task. On top of this, to select the best-role-fit candidate in a short period of time is even more of a challenge. It is thanks to technology that there are automated and structured solutions in the form of technical assessments that enable recruiters to overcome this challenge.
Recruitment is a tough business. Stressful for recruiters and unforgiving if anything goes wrong. Given this, it is only meaningful to employ tools that make the process error-free, unbiased, transparent, honest and, above all, efficient.

References

• blog.techtalentsouth.com
• linkedin.com
• mitre.org
• thehindubusinessline.com