Hire developers with online code challenges!

ChallengeRocket
4 min readAug 21, 2018
Source: Unsplash

Today’s recruitment processes face one of the biggest challenges in years, and it’s the fact that the marked is now candidate-driven. In the light of this new obstacle to overcome, how does your business stand out from the crowd to attract and retain the most valuable tech talents? Hire through online code challenges!

A candidate-driven market is a double-edged sword, as, for the candidates it presents the opportunity to be selective in the job offers, and to negotiate the terms of employment. For businesses this poses the problem of striking the balance between being attractive to candidates while still making profit. Innovation in any area of company’s operations requires investment, but such an investment needs to eventually return profits. Technical recruitment innovation is no different.

Services like LinkedIn already enable businesses to utilize the internet in recruitment processes. It’s common practice for companies to have online presence on this platform, not only for marketing purposes, but also to source tech talents via the internet. It’s not a coincidence that LinkedIn offers paid subscription plans for recruiters, this method is working. Is this, however, enough to hire the best of the best?

What are online code challenges?

Online code challenges are a very condensed hackathon formula, squeezed into an online test. Instead of presenting the participants with a wide problem that can be solved with a magnitude of different approaches and ideas, online code challenges require the participants to achieve a precisely defined goal with their coding skills. Frequently, providing just the code is not the only part of the challenge, and a set of questions related to area of programming concerned is present as well. As the challenge is not aimed at just one person, but rather open to a wide group of contestants, the results can easily be assessed by an algorithm thanks to the nature of the challenge. This allows for preparation of list of the most promising candidates.

How online code challenges help hire developers?

The candidates’ time is the most valuable asset they have, and you, as an employer, need to respect that. Rescheduling, or even cancelling job interviews is completely out of question, but even before a one-to-one conversation like that, there are ways in which you can get ahead of competition in terms of recrutation processes. Online code challenges are the perfect opportunity for both your business, as well as the candidates to make the first step towards a fruitful relationship in form of employment.

CoderPad offers a medium for companies to share coding challenges with candidates in order to assess their skills before hiring. They want to fight the trend of diminishing the skills of programmers during job interviews. They believe that being required to draw a piece of code on a whiteboard during a job interview shouldn’t be the deciding factor in getting (or not getting) the job, as it contradicts their working environment and experience gained through years of education and hard work.

At ChallengeRocket we believe that to hire a developer you need to change your approach. Recruiting tech talents is different from giving a job to sales manager, and that will differ from hiring a mechanic. A regular job interview is not the right method to source programmers to your company. Online code challenges are the perfect middle ground on which businesses and software developers can reach an understanding in terms of recruitment. Programmers should be allowed to present their skills the way they acquired them, and that is through writing an actual piece of code that can be compiled and tested. Recruiters on the other hand gain the confidence that an expansive CV is backed by practical knowledge. We can help those two worlds meet thanks to our community of over 35.000 tech enthusiasts that are ready to be challenged by your company in the most creative of ways.

Codility is another example of a platform for code challenges for hiring processes. They offer complex services that assist the businesses throughout the entirety of recruitment, starting from sourcing candidates, sharing the code challenges with them, assessing their results, and even interviewing.

Today everyone appreciates the convenience the internet is presenting us with, why should recruitment be any different? With online code challenges your business can separate the candidates vaguely interested in working for you from the ones that want to be committed. And from their perspective, they can get a glimpse of what working for you would look like before even attending an interview. It’s a time-saving hack that benefits both sides involved!

Fast-paced nature of today’s companies forced by the ever increasing competition pushes business owners to go beyond the known boundaries in every area, recruitment and HR tech included. Online code challenges as an aid in finding the right candidate seems to be a promising solution.

Does your company need help recruiting tech talents? Here at ChallengeRocket.com we can help you source the best specialist, and tell you how to hire developers your company needs. Visit our website for more information, or get in touch with one of our representatives.

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ChallengeRocket

ChallengeRocket.com helps companies find and engage top-performing tech talent matched to their open job positions using online recruitment SkillChallenges.