Best Developer Assessment Tools - September 2020
The best tech assessment tools, pricing guidelines, benefits, pitfalls, and more
If you’re looking to hire more quality software engineers faster, then you are probably researching the various online coding interview platforms.
These tools allow recruiting and engineering teams to effectively screen more applicants in an unbiased way that allows for the right candidates with the right skills to get the job.
Additionally, online coding assessments (along with video interviews) have become more popular in the current COVID-19 pandemic where in person interviews are becoming necessary with most offices closed.
Below is our research into this space - everything you need to know before deciding on whether or not to move forward with buying a coding interview solution, along with suggested partners that we’ve personally vetted. Good luck and let us know if we’re missing anything!
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We spend hundreds of hours researching the best HR and recruiting software so you don’t have to. We never take money from vendors during our research phase and rely heavily on practitioners and experts to help us recommend the right software. However we may earn a fee if you click on vendor links on this page.
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16
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In this guide you'll find
- Top Tech Assessment Platforms
- Benefits of Tech Recruiting Software
- Common Pitfalls and Misconceptions about Online Coding Interview Platforms
- Coding Interview Software Pricing
- Staying Organized
- Questions to Ask on Demos
- Companies Using Tech Assessment Platforms: Andela
- Developer Assessment Tools FAQs
- Final Advice on Tech Assessment
Featured in
Top Tech Assessment Platforms
We track thousands of HRTech solutions, these are the best online coding interview tool per our research and expert council as of September 2020
Why we love it
:
With an impressive 25+ languages supported, CodinGame's challenge-based training platform allows programmers to improve their coding skills and recruiters to source, screen and retain talented developers.
CodinGame
Review
CodinGame make the evaluation and shortlisting of programmers simple and fast. By challenging developers on real-life problems, they help recruiters and CTOs reduce hiring costs with reliable results on candidates' skills. Clients include Nasdaq, Thales and Ubisoft.
CodinGame
Customers
EA, Thales, Roche, Dassault Systèmes, GE
CodinGame
Stats
- 97% customer satisfaction rate
- 50% cost to hire saved
- Over 14 million coding challenges completed
- Over 2 million members in their developer community
CodinGame
Pricing:
CodinGame starts with a 14-day free trial. After that, you can move to either of their paid plans:
- Growth: This plan costs €249 per month and is designed for companies that want to hire just a few developers in the next months.
- Enterprise: This plan is made for high-growth businesses with complex and urgent hiring needs. Contact the Sales team for pricing.
Best For
CodinGame is best suited for medium and large companies looking to source and screen developers.
Worth Checking Out:
You’ll soon be able to boost candidate experience and gamify your CodinGame Assessment campaigns with innovative game-based programming exercises.
Why we love it
:
Used by massive companies including Facebook, Apple and Klarna, Qualified enables hiring managers to assess software engineers at scale with online coding tests in a natural coding environment.
Qualified
Review
Qualified allows your team to effectively assess technical talent while saving your recruiting and engineering team time. The platform was developed by the creators of CodeWars, a community where over 1 million engineers sharpen their skills. They’re focused on unit-testing and test driven development to design assessments that mirror actual programming work as much as possible. Their customers include Apple, GE and UC Berkeley.
Qualified
Customers
Apple, Klarna, Domino's, Thinkful, Facebook, Zoom
Qualified
Stats
- Founded in 2016
- Facilitates assessments for over 28 programming languages
Qualified
Pricing:
Qualified does offer a free trial. Beyond that, you need to get in touch with a sales rep to receive a custom quote based on your needs.
Best For
Qualified is best suited for enterprise customers with heavy needs for developers.
Worth Checking Out:
This is a great platform if you want to accurately screen engineers with real world problems.
Why we love it
:
With over 2,500 customers, including 25% of Fortune 100 companies, HackerRank is one of the largest technical assessment and remote interview solutions available.
HackerRank
Review
HackerRank allows companies to deeply understand the skill sets of potential engineer hires through both automated code screens and live programming exercises. Their 2,500 customers include small engineering teams all the way up through Stripe, Goldman Sachs and LinkedIn. From data scientists of full stack engineers, HackerRank can help you identify the best talent, set a consistent hiring bar, and generally improve your recruiting process.
HackerRank
Customers
Cisco, Twitter, Bloomberg, VMware, Airbnb
HackerRank
Stats
- 2,600+ Customers (over 25% of Fortune 100 companies use HackerRank)
- 16+ million Developers
- 170 million Code Submissions Across all assessments and interviews
HackerRank
Pricing
Aside from their free trial, HackerRank has four plans. When billed annually, they cost as follows:
- Interview: This plan costs $25 per month.
- Individual: This plan costs $249 per month.
- Team:This plan costs $599 per month.
- Enterprise Platform: This plan has custom pricing. Contact HackerRank’s Sales team for a quote.
Best For
In their words, HackerRank is "enterprise-ready for effortless scaling". This means it's used both by fast-growing startups and Fortune 100 companies.
Worth Checking Out:
If you're a developer, you can join a community to 11 million software engineers to sharpen your skills.
Why we love it
:
Codility’s technical recruitment platform allows hiring managers to test the coding skills of developers and make evidence-based hiring decisions at scale.
Codility
Review
Codility is laser focused on helping the right people get the right jobs based on skills, not background. One of the things we like the most about this platform is the positive feedback around the accuracy of assessment from developers who’ve taken the tests.
Codility
Customers
PayPal, Okta, Deloitte, Zalando, Volvo
Codility
Stats
- 1500 customers in 63 countries
- 30,000 candidate evaluations facilitate monthly
- 40+ languages and technologies
Codility
Pricing
The pricing of Codility’s solutions varies depending on the scale of your technical recruitment. Contact their Sales team for a custom quote.
Best For
Codility is best suited for enterprises.
Worth Checking Out:
Codility has put together a comprehensive developer demographic report full of data to help you recruit engineers.
Why we love it
:
Byteboard interviews replace pre-onsite interviews across all of your key technical roles with a small, time-boxed project that simulates real-life asynchronous work.
Byteboard
Review
Byteboard was incubated inside of Google's Area 120. Their solution enables companies to assess engineering candidates through real world engineering exercises vs more academic constructs like algorithms and data structures.
Byteboard
Customers
Lyft, Arcadia, Betterment, PlayVS, Ezoic
Byteboard
Stats
- 88% satisfied candidates post-interview
- 57% avg. onsite-to-offer rate (industry avg. of 25%)
- 100% reduction in pre-onsite interviewer time
Byteboard
Pricing
Byteboard doesn't disclose their prices upfront. Contact a Sales rep to get a custom quote.
Best For
Byteboard is best suited for large companies.
Worth Checking Out:
Interviews are blind and paired with structured rubrics to limit bias in evaluation.
Why we love it
:
Using sophisticated assessments, as well as candidate authentication and fraud detection tools, Filtered’s technical hiring solution allows you to maximize the quality of your current and future tech teams.
Filtered.AI
Review
Filtered.ai allows companies to implement a skills based hiring process for their technical hires through in depth virtual assessments. Their solution has more signal than simply screening resumes, sophisticated anti-fraud detection, and specializes in testing more experienced candidates focused on architecting systems vs simply writing code. Marquee customers include Lyft, Cigna, and Pinterest.
Filtered.AI
Customers
Facebook, Delta, Informatica, Lyft, Cengage
Filtered.AI
Stats
Filtered.AI
Pricing
Filtered has two plans:
- Starter: This plan packs all the basics to better evaluate candidates.
- Enterprise: This plan provides access to the full platform and is ideal for companies with frequent and urgent assessment needs. Contact Filtered’s team for a price quote.
Best For
Filtered is best suited for large companies.
Worth Checking Out:
Filtered thinks about the candidate experience, not just the efficiency of the recruiting process, and has an average candidate rating of 4.75/5.0.
Why we love it
:
CoderPad’s technical interview and screening tool is simple, fast, and powerful. It emulates a real-world, working environment and lets candidates write programs that run.
CoderPad
Review
CoderPad allows technical teams to replace whiteboard interviews (or even worse, over the phone interviews where candidates are expected to program in a text editor that won't even run their code) with a live programming environment that can facilitate both in person and virtual interviews. Their solution lets applicants work in real time on a problem in an IDE where they can test their solutions and collaborate with your team - see their skills, style and smarts as they solve real problems. Customers include Lyft, AirBnB, Dropbox and many more.
CoderPad
Customers
Slack, Netflix, Shopify, Snowflake, One Medical
CoderPad
Stats
- 3,300+ customers
- 40+ countries
- 3 million+ interviews in CoderPad
- 90,000+ interviews per month
CoderPad
Pricing
CoderPad has three plans
- Personal: For $50 per month, this plan accommodates a single-user plan to collaborate with candidates on writing working code.
- Team: For $250 per month, this plan facilitates collaboration on questions, files, and databases.
- Business: For $750 per month, this plan equips companies with the tools they need for high-volume interviewing.
Best For
CoderPad can be used by companies of all sizes.
Worth Checking Out:
This solution is great for high-signal technical interviews, and interviews with more senior engineers. In addition to the IDE, you can interact over audio and video.
Why we love it
:
CodeSignal’s technical assessment solution packs professionally-designed coding tests and a proprietary predictive coding score, giving tech recruiters deep insights into candidates’ programming skills and abilities.
CodeSignal
Review
CodeSignal’s developer vetting process aspires to be as close to the real world job as possible to get to the heart of a person’s skills and aptitude. The reality is that many qualified applicants have unhelpful resumes, and aren’t good at interviewing. But, these people may be great for the job. If you want to get nerdy, CodeSignal has published several in depth papers on how their vetting algorithms work.
CodeSignal
Customers
Uber, Zoom, Robinhood, Asana, Gusto, Brex, Quora, Reddit
CodeSignal
Stats
- At Outreach, implementing CodeSignal meant freeing up 40-60% of their engineers' time.
- 70+ languages and tools supported
CodeSignal
Pricing
CodeSignal doesn't disclose prices upfront. They prefer to start by understanding your recruiting process and the type of challenges you're facing. Based on that, they can provide you with a custom package after a scheduled call.
Best For
CodeSignal is best suited for enterprises.
Worth Checking Out:
CodeSignal has an automated proctoring feature that allows for scaled supervision during interviews.
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Benefits of Tech Recruiting Software
There are several key advantages that talent acquisition teams can reap from using software to vet engineering candidates. Some people ask, what is a tech assessment? A technical assessment is a coding test that mirrors the real world work of a computer engineer at a company and asks the job applicant to complete a series of coding exercises in a developer environment that tests their skills as a programmer. Like any pre-employment evaluation tool, it is meant to test an applicant’s likelihood of succeeding in a potential role. However, there are specific benefits to this segment of online assessment platforms.
- Remote Interviews: If you’re looking to hire remote engineers, or cannot meet in person due to the restraints of COVID-19, virtual tech assessments are a great way to continue moving the interview process forward, along with video interviews.
- Engineer Time: First off, your engineering teams don’t have to spend nearly as much time in the earliest parts of the recruiting cycle. This means software engineers can spend more time coding. In many cases, this increase in productivity is similar to a company hiring 10% more engineers.
- Better Hires: Your engineering team is no doubt brilliant, but are they the best interviewers? How many job applicants do they unfairly disqualify in the early days simply because their specialty isn’t hiring. Unbiased coding tests allow you to better asses your top job applicants through standardized interview questions that test skills in the programming languages you care the most about.
- Candidate Experience: Because your software engineer screens are now automated, you can evaluate a larger number of applicants. This allows you to give more people the opportunity to go through the screen a show their coding skills beyond what is on their resume.
- Diversity Hiring: An engineering assessment tool evaluates skills objectively and isn’t biased by gender, ethnicity, age, nor educational pedigree. This means the people who have the skills to do the job will make it to the next phase.
- More Signal: Generally speaking a resume is a poor proxy for how strong a developer is. Coding tests allow employers to expand their pipeline beyond people who simply look good on paper.
- Easy to Get Started: Most of these vendors offer free trials to get started. This means you can quickly understand the workflow for a given tool, and how it can impact your overall hiring process. Our advice is to have someone from recruiting and engineering involved during any pilot or trial phase as both organizations need to buy into this initiative.
Common Pitfalls and Misconceptions about Online Coding Interview Platforms
We strongly believe that online coding tests are a great way to streamline your engineering hiring while producing a meaningful return on investment. That said, there are several misconceptions and pitfalls that we see from the talent acquisition community that we want you to be aware of.
- Screening, not interviewing: Engineer interview tools are great at screening candidates. However, they are not a replacement for the actual interview. You still need to understand how someone deals with conflict, compromise, communication, etc before hiring them. Coding tools are merely the first step.
- Diversity: Make sure you understand how diversity candidates are scoring on the tests you are administering. One vendor in this space found their tests were biased against female engineers simply because no females were originally involved in writing the tests. Getting women involved in building the question set fixed this problem.
- Engineer buy in: Your engineering team needs to trust in these assessments. If they don’t, this solution provides very little value as they’ll still need to spend time doing their own screens. Educating the engineering team typically happens from a leader on the recruiting side. Of course, there are hiring managers spearheading this change as well. To ensure a successful buying and implementation of the product, get engineering involved when you are demo’ing/trialing the product.
- Fraud: Understand how the screening tool you’re using ensures that candidates are taking the tests themselves and not posting fraudulent scores.
- What’s tested matters: You have the ability to customize your coding tests in a way that reflects the specific programming languages and skills relevant to the job. However, what idiosyncrasies are still being left out? Maybe you only pair program, and need to test this. Maybe there should be a psychometric part of this test, or specific aptitudes that need to be measured in addition to skills.
- Tool, not marketplace: These tools enable your recruiting to team to vet candidates more effectively. But, they are not sources of candidates like a job board would be (although some of the best tech assessment vendors can help with sourcing).
- Don’t leave humans out: Just because you have a new way to vet software engineers doesn’t mean you can simply let your coding assessment handle all candidate interactions. Like any pre-employment screening, you need to realize candidate experience is paramount. Set expectations, sell the person on your culture, and overall just treat them as you’d want to be as an applicant.
Coding Interview Software Pricing
Tech recruiting platform pricing is typically based on the number of interviews you’ll be conducting on a monthly basis. We like this because the more interviews you conduct, the more value you’re going to get.
Pricing starts in the $50/mo range for companies who are just getting started with one req, and can grow into the 6 figure range pretty easily.
Please note that these are ranges and are meant to give you a general idea of how much you might pay for your organization. However, prices will vary depending on a number of factors including: the features you need, support levels, vendor you partner with, HRTech integrations, etc.
Also note that many of the best online coding assessment platforms have free trials.
Staying Organized
Are you looking at multiple tech assessment platforms? We thought you might be! Our recommendation is to use a structured rubric to evaluate these tools so that you can make the right decision for your business after demo’ing a few of the platforms. We put together the below spreadsheet so that you can keep track of your key criteria when looking at these engineer hiring solutions. Our hope is that it allows you to make the best decision for your business!
Questions to Ask on Demos
You’ll notice there are a few suggested questions in this spreadsheet already. In addition to talking to a sales person to vet these vendors, we recommend opening up a free account to play around with the code editor. Setup a pre-canned screen for a data scientist or programmer, and see the process they’d go through. Then, take a look at how screen applicants are presented to your hiring team.
How does this stack up to other online assessment platforms you’ve looked at? Does it give you confidence you’ll be able to judge an applicant’s programming skills? What other interview questions can you embed into these skill tests? Make sure you think about this both from the recruiting team’s perspective, and the candidate’s.
Companies Using Tech Assessment Platforms: Andela
Andela is a fast growing company faced with a massive challenge - how do we efficiently find and hire the top 1% of developers across Africa at scale (they get over 4,000 applicants/mo!).
Maya Neria, Senior Product Manager, was in charge of figuring out how to replace a home grown tech assessment platform that wasn’t cutting it with a solution that would mimic the real world while also providing feedback to candidates. After demo’ing over 100 solutions, Andela selected a tech assessment platform, Qualified, and moved forward with overhauling their developer screening process.
Andela now starts their interview process by sending applicants a study packet on Python/Javascript basics, tests knowledge of this packet via a simple quiz through Google Forms, and then moves candidates into the tech assessment platform. Currently 15% of people who pass the tech assessment are hired. Moving to a standardized platform has allowed Andela to save time, improve the candidate experience, and create a more objective scoring rubric for future candidates.
Developer Assessment Tools FAQs
What is a developer assessment tool?
A developer assessment tool is a software platform designed to administer coding tests to candidates to see if their skills match the job reqs.
Why use a coding interview platform?
A coding interview platform acts as a screening tool for developers. By testing different language proficiencies at the beginning of the talent acquisition funnel, hiring teams can narrow down their list of top candidates much faster.
Can a coding interview platform help with recruiting?
Yes, a coding interview platform can greatly help recruiting efforts. In addition to saving time by pre-screening candidates, developer assessments can reduce bias by objectively testing skills, allow for remote interviewing, and give better signal on skills beyond what a resume shows.
What different kinds of coding interview platforms are there?
There are different kinds of coding interview platforms depending on who you are interviewing. Some solutions are focused on the top 1% of software engineering talent, others offer more general coding challenges. Some focus on academic assessment, others on real world problems. It all depends on your company’s hiring angle.
What features do technical assessment tools offer?
Some features of technical assessment tools include:
- Testing tools for all popular coding languages
- Interview recording
- Video calling
- Test customization
- Plagiarism detection
- Note-taking
- Detailed stats and reporting
What are the best technical assessment platforms?
The best technical assessment platforms are:
- CodinGame: Gamify your tech assessments
- Qualified: Real-world coding challenges
- Filtered.AI: Great platform for senior engineers
- Codility: Great developer feedback
- CodeSignal: Measure developer skills accurately
- HackerRank: Free trial available
- Byteboard: Simulated coding tests
- CoderPad: Great for live coding interviews
Final Advice on Tech Assessment
Any company hiring more than a few engineers a year should take a look at using a tech assessment platform. They save your engineering team time. They lead to better hires. And, most are very simple to do a pilot with. You can get a 30 minute demo of one of our pre-vetted vendors to understand how this will fit into the specifics of your recruiting process:
Best Tech Assessment Platforms
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