There’s not a single doubt that hiring has changed permanently thanks to the pandemic. What earlier required candidates to take a day off work, wait for hours for hiring managers, and write assessments on paper, is now become a convenient process for both candidates and talent professionals alike. The world's top tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google have shifted to new hiring processes, and they rightly carry the reputation of hiring the best talent in the market. So, rightfully so, remote hiring has become the mainstream mode of operation for many companies worldwide.
The shift in how to conduct a coding interview remotely has brought its opportunities and challenges to the fore. Organizations have had to rely on cutting-edge technologies, and these companies have gained a reputation for hiring only the best candidates. And conducting online coding interviews was no exception to that rule. One of the primary challenges for hiring managers was conducting coding interviews efficiently to help them select the best candidates.
Conducting an online coding interview can be a lot of pressure for hiring managers and talent professionals. You want to ensure the candidate has good experience, meets the role’s skills, is a culture fit, has good coding skills, and a number of other parameters to ensure they’re not a bad hire.
We know there’s a lot to be done; so, to help you hire the best tech talent, we have put together tips for coding interviews that can help you conduct an excellent coding interview.
What is an online coding interview?
An online coding interview, also called a virtual coding interview, is an interview process to assess the candidate's logical skills and problem-solving abilities in real time. It includes hiring managers and interviewing software engineers on various languages, frameworks, libraries, or APIs. During the coding interview exercises, the candidate usually has to give access to their microphone and camera.
For hiring managers, remote coding interview exercises are the most effective way to evaluate a candidate's hands-on coding skills and the process and thought behind creating a particular code. It also enables candidates to showcase their capabilities and readiness for the job. Aside from interviewing a software engineer remotely, online coding interviews are considered as natural as a physical interview. This comes in handy in avoiding multiple interview rounds and reducing the time to hire.
The value of coding interview exercises, when done in the right way, reveals how a developer thinks and behaves while coding. And that's the most important thing to learn about a programming candidate. This information cannot be gained in any other way than actually watching them code.
iMocha eliminates the need to conduct multiple interview rounds, avoiding bad hires and poor candidate experience. This platform's Live Coding Interview saves significant time and ensures a company stays a step ahead in hiring the best talent.
What's different about an online coding interview?
In traditional whiteboard interviews, a coder first used to write code on a whiteboard (or a piece of paper), and then hiring managers had to check whether or not the code is correct – this process was extremely time-consuming, inconvenient, and didn’t really replicate the real code or work environment. An online coding interview, on the other hand, helps evaluate coding abilities in real time in a real programming environment. An online interview platform will enable interviewers to choose questions from the skills library and watch candidates write the logic to solve them.
This type of coding interview enables recruiters and hiring managers to streamline the technical interview processes. iMocha's live coding feature provides a convenient and seamless platform for conducting coding interviews. Unlike other platforms, it offers an all-in-one integrated platform where you can perform these assessments and track and host online interviews without hassle or worry.
When interviewing a software engineer, hiring managers can rate the performance on five criteria: code quality, technical communication, code optimization, code design, and problem-solving. This helps evaluate candidates' thought process and approach to hiring top coders.
How to create a good interview question?
Hiring top tech candidates can be challenging. However, with the right set of interview questions, it can be easy. Your candidate's experience should be challenging but fair and doable. Here are tips for coding interviews on creating interview questions that give you actionable candidate answers.
1. Understand the organization's needs and wants
Every company has its own culture and methods when hiring for a tech role. But knowing what your organization needs and wants from its tech employees will help you create more practical questions. Start visualizing mentally just by asking yourself the following questions:
- What are the company values?
- Why does the engineering team need a new hire?
- What is this position's job description?
2. Build-in layers of complexity
You want the candidate to feel free of excessively detailed questions toward the beginning. This can lead to taking up their valuable time. Instead, creating questions that will gradually progress in complexity is always a good idea. By doing this, you can help the candidate feel like they are solving more difficult coding interview challenges—this also creates a great candidate experience.
3. Draw from your experience
It's easy to take questions from a skills library, but then you can end up with the same questions, similar to every other interview. Or, your team members could end up with the same questions everyone else asks.
To avoid such a situation, you can create a question relevant to your work; this makes it both unique and exciting. And remember, although you need to create unique questions, they should be manageable and unheard-of to the candidate.
What are the pre-requisites for conducting/joining Live Coding Interview?
Read our list that would help you conduct a smooth Live Coding Interview session.
How to Run a Live Coding Interview
During a live coding interview, an interviewer has a lot of influence over a candidate taking up a position and the impression an organization creates. It is important to make the candidate feel comfortable during the interview, as it will allow them to showcase their best work.
Hiring managers can remotely assess a coder's logical skills and problem-solving abilities in real time. iMocha's Live Coding Interview platform will allow you to assess real-time coding skills hassle-free. This platform can conduct interviews on the go in a real coding environment.
You can hire the best coders by recreating a coding interview environment that can assess programming skills in real time with iMocha's Live Coding Interview. Do you want to know how to conduct Live Coding Interviews to identify the best developers? Here’s how:
1. Make the candidate's experience comfortable
During the interview, candidates will ask clarifying questions. As a hiring manager, you have to create a balancing act — be helpful but won't reveal the solution simultaneously. Try to put the candidate at ease by explaining that it is up to them to determine what approach to take.
2. Use a real-life code environment
A real-code environment will make the candidates more comfortable, and hiring managers will be able to view on-the-job coding skills. This way, you’ll also be able to gauge the logic behind each code and won't have to focus much on syntax, which is what happens in real life as well.
For instance, iMocha’s Live Coding Interview helps you assess and watch the code as it is being written, and AI-LogicBox, for which iMocha has a patent, helps you assess for languages where online compilers are not available. We have listed some frequently asked questions that the interviewers may have during the Live Coding Interview if you wish to read them.
Also, If you wish to know more about coding interviews and how they can help you, visit Top 10 Coding Interview Tools to consider
How to draw estimations from the candidate's coding test
An online coding platform can help you gauge a number of things: each candidate’s skills level, how they fare among the candidate pool, how your candidates are benchmarked against the industry, and more. And more importantly, an excellent coding interview will represent a coder's authentic work sample under the same conditions they would face at work.
With this coding interview guide here are few estimations to draw from a candidate’s coding test:
1. Everyone makes mistakes. Were these mistakes that any reasonable person would make? Do they indicate disinterest on the part of the candidate or just unfamiliarity with the problem? How fast were they able to recover from them?
2. When the candidate makes a decision that turns out to be correct, were they just lucky, or did they have a solid reason for doing so?
3. Was the candidate able to discuss and convey what they were trying to do in a way you could understand?
4. Did the candidate have a good grasp of their code and be able to make changes, when necessary, smoothly? Or did they get lost in their code, tangled up in their logic, totally independent from the task they were trying to solve?
What are the criteria for selecting a good developer?
Here are some signs that you met the best candidate for a software development position.
1. They are passionate about coding
2. They possess good problem-solving abilities
3. They have good communication skills
4. They have proficiency in more than one coding language
Other than these, on the basis of millions of assessments our platform has conducted, here are some cognitive skills that an ideal coder must possess.
What criteria does the interviewee consider a proper working culture?
For any employee to be successful at a company involves more than completing work and maintaining a schedule. They also need to be a good fit for the company culture. Company culture is an organization's shared values and priorities, as well as how people interact and relate. Here are the criteria that candidates consider to work in an organization.
- Interview experience
- Work-life balance
- Are employees involved in decision-making?
- Are teamwork and collaboration valued?
- What's the company's investment in training and professional development?
- Is there a pattern of promotion in the company?
Five generic questions to ask at the start of the interview to have healthy interaction
Of course, you want to ask questions about the job role you're looking to fill. Other interview questions help you dig deeper and have a healthy interaction with the candidate. With these questions for an interview, you should get a good sense of whether this potential candidate could be a successful member of your team. So, let's jump in with top five best questions to ask an interviewee.
- What's the most exciting project you've worked on in a past position?
- How would your co-workers describe you?
- Do you work best in a team or alone?
- What do you know about our company, and why do you want to work here?
- What are the skills and strengths you bring to this position?
Also Read: Top 9 Ways to Test the Programming Skills of Candidates
FAQs
1. What is the ideal time to conduct a coding interview?
One standard layout is a 60-minute coding interview that consists of the following:
- 5 minutes buffer: if the candidate is late or the previous interview runs over time.
- 5 minutes of introduction and resume discussion
- 45 minutes of coding
- 5 minutes to solve any queries from the candidates
This will vary with the overall length of the interview and personal preference.
2. What are the critical challenges in conducting coding Interviews?
If you are about to start a hiring process, here are some recruitment challenges you should be aware of and ready to face beforehand.
- Finding the right candidate that fits the job can be a difficult and tedious task.
- Ensuring that candidates get a good candidate experience, whether hired or not.
- Standing out from other companies to attract talent
- Recruiting within tight time frames
- Aligning with hiring managers' demands/job requirements
