Owing to the ever-changing work environment, skill assessment platforms have rightfully gained popularity.
The reason being?
Many companies have expressed discontent with hiring a bad employee due to their inability to identify the right candidate.
HR leaders began leveraging skill assessment tools to make more objective and fair methods to make hiring decisions. These tools help recruiters and hiring managers to assess an applicant's ability to execute specific skills or skill sets, providing an unbiased evaluation of potential candidates.
Undoubtedly, skills assessments have been proven to be three times more effective than relying on gut instinct when assessing CVs. Despite this, some hiring managers have expressed concern that these assessments might confine them to identifying candidates' theoretical knowledge rather than their practical skills.
If you are one of those recruiters, then make use of take home assignments in your hiring process.
Take Home Assignments are one of the most effective ways for hiring managers to find out how candidates tackle different problems that they will most likely face on the job.
Let's take a deep dive and learn what a take home assignment interview is, what it entails, and how hiring managers could utilize it.
Let's get started!
So, what is a Take Home Assignment Interview?
Take home assignment interview, as the name suggests, are interview questions designed to assess the job readiness of candidates with the help of real-world scenarios.
Take home project interview questions are not standardized questions you can use to assess people from different backgrounds. Contrary to that, these interview assignments are specifically crafted to evaluate the skills and abilities required to succeed for which you intend to hire.
Instead of asking applicants to respond to questions on the spot, this form of interview assignment offers flexibility to candidates. It allows applicants to think critically and formulate logical solutions to the problem.
Recruiters introduce this interview question after the initial screening process to gauge a candidate's technical knowledge.
These types of questions generally contain the following:
- A detailed description of the task
- Instructions for candidates
- Guidelines that need to be followed
- Submission data
What is the goal of the take home project interview?
The goal of take home project interviews is to provide candidates with more time and flexibility to think, as opposed to being constrained by a set number of minutes. It helps the hiring team identify candidates who can formulate exceptional work and better meet the organization's needs.
In other words, the goal of the take home project interview is to:
- Evaluate the candidate's skills in-depth
- Simulate professional developer's flow
- Hire project-based candidates
- Better replication of the on-the-job experience
Take home coding assignments differ from other technical assessments because they allow candidates to showcase their abilities in a more realistic setting. Its main objective is to understand how a candidate solves problems, approaches challenges, and works in general.
Many skill assessment platforms available in the market, such as iMocha, allow you and your candidates to code freely and naturally – with the features you expect to have in your IDE.
What are the benefits of take home interview assignments?
Take home interview assignments come with a variety of benefits for companies as well as candidates.
For organizations
- It allows you to see the qualities of a candidate that would be difficult to investigate in standard interviews.
- It enables you to assess how applicants handle unfamiliar problems and their strategy for solving them.
- It lets you quickly move quality candidates through the hiring funnel and avoid developer/interviewer burnout.
- It allows you to assess applicants' algorithm-building abilities.
- Utilizing this tool, you can set deadline-based take home assessments.
- It assists you in evaluating applicants based on their hands-on project management skills that go beyond textbook knowledge, algorithms, and syntax.
- It simulates real-world scenarios to assess potential recruits for practical abilities and promptly onboard project-ready individuals without additional training.
For candidates
- Take home technical assessments give applicants an idea of what technology the company might be utilizing at their potential workplace.
- It allows applicants to showcase more skills than responding to interview questions, such as writing, presenting, critical thinking, etc.
- It enables candidates to hone their research abilities and expand their knowledge of applied topics beyond facts and memorization.
How to include take home technical assessment in the recruitment process?
Before moving on, let's assume you have shortlisted a few software engineer candidates. You are planning to assess their hands-on experience and suitability for the desired role.
You crafted an in-depth take home coding assessment with clear objectives and steps that you expect candidates to complete. However, it is possible that some applicants might feel overwhelmed and choose to withdraw from the hiring process.
The likelihood of that event happening is steep. It has often been observed that candidates tend to remove themselves from the recruitment process if they feel the assignment parameters are unclear or consider it too burdensome due to the overwhelming amount of work required.
To help you avoid this, iMocha offers project-based assessment functionality.
iMocha is a skill assessment software trusted by more than 500 fortunate companies that help enterprises make skill-intelligent decisions to obtain job-fit talent faster. It provides powerful tools for coding interviews, technical recruiting, university recruitment, lateral hiring, and diversity hiring, helping organizations improve the quality of their hires.
iMocha's Project-Based Assessments provide an extensive list of simulators to help evaluate a job candidate's aptitude for the desired role.
It enables you to evaluate a candidate's project readiness by providing real-world scenarios and a set time limit for them to build a project using our compiler or IDE. Not only you'll get a complete analytics report and syntax reference, but the mini-projects are also auto-evaluated for your convenience.
That means no time is wasted on manual evaluation, and you can get detailed reports on candidates' skills, competencies, and weaknesses with the click of a button.
Also watch: iMocha projects video on Simulated Assessments on Real-World Scenarios.
These test cases provide a reliable framework for assessing each candidate's qualifications, allowing for a fair and impartial evaluation process. It ensures that everyone who applies for a job has an equal opportunity to demonstrate their ability to meet the required criteria.
- Compare each candidate with a standard baseline.
- Allow applicants to learn more about the desired solution.
- Evaluate each prospect thoroughly.
Tips For Creating Candidate Friendly Take Home Assignments
To create candidate friendly take home assignments, keep four crucial tips in mind.
- Utilize a variety of tasks: Include a wide range of tasks in your take home assignments to keep candidates involved and motivated.
- Set clear deadlines: Give your applicants a set amount of time to finish the project. It will help them stay on track and complete the project on time.
- Provide clear instructions: Ensure that the assignment instructions are clear and concise, so prospects understand what is expected of them.
- Customize the assessment based on the job role: Make sure your project assessments are narrowed down to effectively evaluate the relevant skill set of employees and competencies in the specific role.
What factors should a hiring manager consider for a take home project interview?
Listed below are some essential factors to consider as a hiring manager for take home assignment interview:
- Quality over perfectionism: Take home assignments are an excellent way for the company to determine how candidates would address a real-world business problem. Still, expecting even the most qualified candidates to present a solution they could effectively implement would be unreasonable.
- Time management: Rather than focusing solely on the candidate's technical abilities, take advantage of this opportunity to evaluate how long it took the applicant to complete the assessment, ensuring that they could manage their time effectively and complete the task within the time frame specified.
- Ability to follow instructions: You can also use it to assess an applicant's ability to follow instructions, ensuring that they understand the assignment's criteria and can finish the task as outlined.
- Attention to detail: Pay close attention to the assignment details and ensure their code is properly formulated.
