Technical skill assessments have transformed the recruiting process for companies and candidates alike – and you don’t need to take our word for it. Research conducted by the Aberdeen Group revealed some major insights – conducting skills screening tests before hiring reduces turnover rates by 39% and increases the likelihood of employees exceeding performance goals by 24%.
Technical skill tests can be a recruiter’s best friend, but only if they’re designed right. A poorly designed skills test will fail to successfully evaluate candidates, and you might end up hiring someone unfit for the position. This is why it’s crucial to use the right technical screening tool – we’ll take a look at the best ones in this piece.
What is a technical skills screening tool?
A technical skills screening tool is software that contains a rich library of technical assessment tests, including questions and answers for recruiters to screen and evaluate candidates.
The assessments created on these platforms are used to evaluate candidates before employment by technical recruiters and/or hiring managers.
Why are so many companies using technical skills screening?
Companies used to be limited to resumes and portfolios as a means of screening candidates before interviews, which are adequate at best, and far from reliable. Then technical screening tests popped up and changed the game entirely.
Technical skills screening has revolutionized the recruiting process, allowing companies to screen and evaluate candidates reliably and extensively. A custom skill assessment test goes beyond showcasing a candidate’s profile and provides realistic insights on how ready the person is to tackle real, on-the-job problems. Tech skill tests effectively save companies time, money, and resources when it comes to hiring – or even for assessing an existing employee’s fit for a different role.
How do skill assessments compare to other screening methods?
Skill assessments are not the only type of evaluation used by the hiring teams – job simulation resumes, and reference checks are all common screening methods. The trouble with resumes and reference checks is that they don’t reveal the whole picture. A candidate and often their references will attempt to present the applicant in the best positive light. Unfortunately, this may not be the most accurate portrayal of the candidate’s skills and abilities.
Job simulations, also known as work simulations, require candidates to perform tasks that the role requires in the workplace. These simulations are an effective evaluation tactic to understand how the candidate will perform in the real work environment.
Structured interviews are also an effective evaluation method, and they include a scoring system similar to that of skill assessments. The common denominator between the two methods is that they are both quantitative and can thus be reliably compared and contrasted. Moreover, recruiters can extract useful insights from the collected data.
Skill assessments have the added benefit of providing recruiters with the opportunity to reliably screen out candidates pre-interview. Thus, when it comes to tech hiring, skill tests take the cake to justify reliability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
What are the types of technical screening tests?
Technical screening tests are of different types and are typically customized to evaluate a specific skillset required for the concerned role. A tech skill test may evaluate a candidate on their knowledge of a specific programming language or their understanding of certain algorithms, or on developer skills, among other things.
The best skills screening tools let recruiters generate custom tests on-demand, so you can design an assessment to evaluate a specific skillset required for a given role. Skill assessments can be conducted pre-interview or during the interview, depending on whether you’re using them as a pre-screening tool or as a means of evaluation during the hiring process.
The 5 best technical screening tools
While skill tests are great, we mentioned earlier that you need the right kind of assessment to guarantee fair evaluation and the best results. Therefore, the ideal technical screening tool should offer:
- The ability to measure modern as well as legacy developer skills
- Automation to minimize manual grading – through auto-evaluators and industry-leading compilers
- Exceptional candidate experiences and custom branding opportunities for companies
- Tests specifically tailored to various jobs and roles
- Efficient qualitative score analysis
- Seamless integrations with other hiring solutions
- Unmatched data security for your candidate data
- Video interviews with pair programming abilities
- Comprehensive data insights, analytics, and reporting
Of course, not every tool will have all these features. So let’s take a look at the best technical screening tools for tech recruiters and hiring managers and see which one wins out.
#1 WeCP | We Create Problems
WeCP has the largest repository of technical interview questions & tests. Where other platforms average a few thousand to generously over 10,000 questions, WeCP has over 0.2 million+ technical questions in the bank. The question bank contains skill test questions for every tech role, whether it’s frontend or full-stack development, data science, DevOps, or something else.
Tech recruiters can generate custom tests on-demand with WeCP to evaluate over 2000 different technical skills. Need more customization with the test questions and design? WeCP’s team is on standby to help you out there too.
Aside from the impressive size of the question bank and the high quality of the questions themselves, WeCP sets itself apart from the competition in another big way – the evaluation process. WeCP uses SkillMaps for scientifically evaluating candidates, guaranteeing accuracy, and all the tests in the repository have been thoroughly vetted. Moreover, WeCP’s technical screening is made cheat-proof through:
- Constant addition of new tests
- Internal patrol
- Dynamic rotation
- Advanced plagiarism checker
- AI-based video proctoring
WeCP’s questions are thoroughly scrutinized for difficulty, guaranteeing candidates can’t just Google the answers or prepare for them beforehand. Whether you design a custom test or use a pre-built one, WeCP guarantees unique, challenging, skill-mapped assessments to help you track down the best candidate.
#2 Codility
Codility is a powerful tech screening solution and remote hiring tool tailored for engineering teams. The recruitment platform has been around since 2009 and provides employers with powerful screening and interviewing tools.
Codility has a diverse knowledge base and includes skill tests for various roles – you can use the tool to evaluate potential candidates for frontend and backend developer positions, data science, language skills, and more. However, one drawback of using this tool is that it lacks AI-powered video proctoring and web proctoring features, which may lead to cheating.
One of Codility’s most appreciated features is its ‘candidate feedback’ option. If you enable this feature, Codility provides candidates with a breakdown of their score immediately after submission of the skill test. Enabling automated candidate feedback helps recruiters be more transparent about the hiring process.
#3 CodeSignal
CodeSignal is a popular technical screening tool for tech recruiters with a decent repository of questions, web proctoring, on-demand custom questions, and even video interviews.
CodeSignal is a relatively young recruitment platform, having popped up in 2015, but it has since made a good name for itself. The tool helps recruiters generate custom tests for a wide variety of programming languages and developer skills.
Some candidates have expressed concern regarding CodeSignal’s existing questions, citing them to be verbose and difficult to comprehend. On the whole, though, CodeSignal is a reliable tool. It has helped many tech companies evolve past using resumes for evaluation into the more reliable realm of coding skill tests.
#4 HackerRank
HackerRank is a popular developer screening tool. The platform offers assessment tests for a variety of skills, including tests for full-stack development skills and database skills.
HackerRank has been around since 2012 and has since grown its client list to over 2000. The tool provides framework support and helps recruiters assess up to 44 skills with its rich repository of questions. After designing your custom assessment with HackerRank, you can opt for the automated scoring system or manually score the tests.
#5 HackerEarth
HackerEarth has the makings of a solid technical screening tool – it has a decent question bank (sporting over 15000 questions), has tests for all relevant skills, and has features like video interviews that some of its competitors lack. However, it does miss out on the whiteboarding features that WeCP offers.
Like HackerRank, HackerEarth was founded in 2012 and has since catered to over a thousand clients. The platform supports proctoring and helps recruiters screen and short-list top-performing candidates thanks to reliable coding assessments and an integrated scoring system.
Conclusion
We’ve listed the best platforms available in the market right now, and while they all have a lot to offer, WeCP provides recruiters and hiring teams with the most value, with its unmatched question bank, exceptional security, versatility, SkillMaps based evaluation, and cheat-proof makeup. WeCP is the only all-in-one technical screening tool that provides everything a recruiting team could possibly need.
Schedule a demo with technical recruiting experts at WeCP to see the platform in action and decide for yourself.
