

Ask HN: Recommended online coding test providers for filtering grads? - rotbart

I&#x27;m not a big believer in online testing for normal developer recruitment, however, doing recruitment of graduates means filtering through a large, noisy (as in lacking signal), pool of candidates.<p>Looking for recommendations from the HN community for online testing providers (for testing coding level) that could at least allow me to reduce the initial pool of candidates to a manageable level.<p>Any insight would be appreciated!
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dkhenry
I have been issuing tests to candidates for a long time now and I have used a
plethora of methods to do it. What has worked the best for me was a home
rolled solution of having a server they must ssh into and then having a few
bash scripts that.

    
    
        Set up the user account and a default home directory.
        Runs a job out of cron to check for the user and log them out after a time period.
        Clean up after the test has been reviewed. 
    

I have iterated on that base idea and ended up with a pretty nice intranet
portal and self service test administration system, but then I threw it out
the window and started using HackerRank. Its just easier and it does all the
stuff I want it to do. There are some limitations, but if you just looking to
do an initial screen they work.

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brudgers
The question I have is how can you be sure you're testing for something
meaningful? By which I mean that testing new college grads on knowledge of
Ruby is going to favor people with experience in Ruby and not necessarily
those with a sound grasp of data structures and in the long run. Now if all
you care about is the ability of someone to code up Ruby at a beginner level,
then it's a good test, and in three years you may have someone who still codes
Ruby at a beginner level. But if you want someone who can contribute at a
higher level over the long term, then maybe taking an advanced data structures
elective over a Rails elective is more important than the equivalent of a few
weeks of on the job training.

Going further, a test to filter out candidates is a social act not a technical
one. Some people, and perhaps a higher percentage of strong candidates who
have more options, may forgo the test, or if it is easier than another
company's think less of your company. Unless you're Google class as a resume
builder, your pool of candidates will probably drop simply as a result of
increased friction in the application process.

Sure you may get the desired effect of reducing the number of resumes on your
desk, but you could do that by simply flipping a coin for each one and
ignoring any that come up tails. And as crazy as that sounds at least then you
would know that you were not filtering in a way that was having counter-
productive results.

Good luck.

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asher_
Earlier this year I was in the Philippines recruiting for a development office
there. Although we weren't targeting grad programmers, the market dynamics we
faced were likely similar. There are a whole bunch of substandard programmers
that work there, and so using an online test as an initial filter proved very
useful; there was no other way we could deal with the volume.

A local company we partnered with to help us recruit suggested
[https://codility.com/](https://codility.com/) which we ended up using.

We choose a pair of medium level challenges for the candidates. What we
discovered as we went was that their score on the task was not the most
important information we got from their test. How they wrote their code was.
Looking at how they break up their solutions, and even things such as choices
of - or consistency with - syntax was very informative and a good predictor of
quality.

My advice would be to not set the bar too high for this kind of test, use it
as a filter that eliminates the candidates you definitely don't want to
interview, then proceed with the normal interview process.

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happycry
I would like more companies to let the candidate submit any project that
they've completed in the past 6 months, or give them a small open-ended
project and let them choose how they want to build it. It gives the candidate
a chance to showcase what they are capable of, and it allows you to judge
their programming style.

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blyxem
So you looking for an online service to do your job of filtering who you hire
? Don't be surprised if you don't get what you think you want.

If you're a dev company in any sense, it should be pretty straight forward to
setup some kind of mock project that potentials can checkout and do something
with. Investigate the results.

If you want to know what they are to work with and what skills they have, then
work them...and test some skills you know are needed for the job.

