In 2020, Computer Weekly revealed that each advertised tech role received 22.57 applications on average, a stark increase from the previous year’s 9.62 average. With more tech talent in the market, tech employers are under more pressure to identify the best fit for their organization. Thus, asking the right tech interview questions is more crucial than ever.
In today’s time, resume/CV screening is considered less reliable for screening candidates for technical roles. It’s almost impossible to identify candidates with the best technical skillsets without specifically evaluating them for technical proficiency. This is exactly where technical interviewing formats and skills assessments take the center stage.
In this article, we’ll cover a few of the most reliable technical interview question types. You must ideally follow these questions to identify the best tech candidates and optimize your recruitment funnel.
Tech interview questions digs into candidate techieness
In today’s world, it’s not only crucial for a candidate to be interview ready but, it is also equally important for the interviewer to be prepared for the interview. An ideal interview must be curated with specific tech-based questions, in order to pick the right candidate. These questions should be proficient in evaluating an applicant’s technical knowledge and understanding.
However, to explore the programming skills and practical understanding of the applicants in-depth, you need to leverage hands-on skill assessment questions. Tech interview questions help employers gain deeper insight into a candidate’s programming knowledge. They include questions like:
- ‘Which coding language(s) do you have a strong grip on?’
- ‘How do you maintain your tech knowledge and expertise with changing trends?’
- ‘Walk us through how you manage your source code?’
Why are practical tech interview questions important?
Practical technical interview questions assess candidates’ coding capabilities and thus their suitability for tech roles. An organization’s workforce must continuously design solutions to new problems and optimize their solutions. So, as a tech recruiter, you must ensure that the candidates who are picked for this role, possess sharp problem-solving and coding skills.
While educational qualifications are valuable, they don’t really reveal a candidate’s practical coding skills and problem-solving capabilities. This is why using technical interview questions to evaluate applicants is vital.
Amongst all the popular tech interview questions, algorithmic questions, DevOps assessments, and Project-based evaluation have recently taken the front seat. They have also become quite a favorite go-to-candidate-evaluation-methods of tech recruiters working in companies like Google, Atlassian, AWS, etc.
Six types of tech interview questions to evaluate a technical talent
If you’re looking to hire the best tech talent but confused about what must be included in your technical interview format, you might want to go through these tried-and-tested types of tech interview questions. These questions claim to help you optimize your recruitment process and find the best talent out there.
1. Programming (algorithms) & programming (language)
Gone are the days when tech recruiters relied heavily on academic records to determine the true potential of the candidates. Algorithm and language-based assessments have become a popular choice in the tech world mostly because of their high success rate in picking the best talent.
Using algorithm and language tests, you can evaluate candidates on their hold over various programming languages and ascertain their level of expertise. Programming (algorithm) tests examine the applicants’ analytical and logical reasoning at ease, on different difficulty levels.
These assessments are the best choice for tech employers who wish to gain insight into the applicant’s knowledge and manipulation of the language itself. Such assessments are the most commonly used evaluation technique for a wide range of job roles including software engineering roles.
Tech employers can use versatile platforms like WeCP (We Create Problems) to evaluate candidates in one or more programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, C/C++, Scala, PHP, and more. For roles requiring candidates’ expertise in one or two programming languages, specific language tests tend to yield the most accurate results.
Platforms like WeCP uniquely evaluate performance using hidden test cases that measure correctness and the answer’s quality. Herein, the applicants input their solution into the in-browser IDE, which they can run, check and debug as they please, allowing them to explore the problem statement to the maximum extent of their problem-solving skills.
2. Project questions
Project type questions help recruiters and hiring managers in evaluating the candidates for their advanced programming capabilities and understanding of frameworks. It also helps in determining the expertise of the candidates in solving practical problems. Integrated recruitment platforms like WeCP let tech employers design project-based assessment tests in a self-sufficient testing environment. These question types are mostly popular in picking candidates for software development roles.
You must provide project-type questions to the candidates with a starter code of a stack of your choice. You can choose from in-demand programming languages including Python, MEAN, MERN, Node.js, Angular, React, .NET, etc, as per your requirement. Depending on the role’s requirements, you must also customize the test’s duration and the difficulty level of the assessment.
3. Database questions
Databases make up the backbone of a tech company’s productivity by ensuring data security and organization. Thus, evaluating candidates’ database skills is vital to determine whether they can meaningfully contribute to your organization.
With platforms like WeCP, tech employers can choose from expert-designed database questions for vetting candidates, or make custom tests using our all-in-one tech platform. These questions are considered every tech recruiter’s favourite when picking candidates for the role of database administrators.
You can evaluate applicants’ database skills by giving them schema-based instructions in the assigned questions, and they can choose which language to code their queries in (from SQL, SQLite, MySQL, etc.). Further, the final outcome can be evaluated for accuracy as well as time taken to solve the question.
4. DevOps questions
DevOps skills are some of the most versatile skills in tech, and DevOps questions should thus, thoroughly vet candidates for a range of skills. Applicants suited for roles like Cloud Engineers should possess strong problem-solving skills, familiarity with multiple programming languages, and have creative minds.
In DevOps-type questions, the candidates must perform different practical tasks according to the instructions shared, inside the embedded virtual machine. These questions are most popular for testing skills in cloud technologies, such as Linux, Windows, AWS, Docker, Azure, etc.
You can assess the candidates on the basis of the number of tasks completed by them.
5. Machine learning questions
ML has gained significant traction over the years and is one of the most in-demand skills in tech. Machine learning evaluation tests should assess candidates for various skills including data modeling, programming language proficiency, probability and statistics, and more. Tech recruiters use these types of questions to evaluate candidates applying for roles like Machine Learning engineer.
You must assess the candidates for their concepts, accuracy of their model, and proficiency in handling variable-size datasets.
When designing an ML assessment, tech employers must provide instructions like the requirements of the model and the algorithm that the applicants should use to train the model. Using statistical technical like Accuracy Score, RMSE, F1-score, and more, to check the accuracy of every answer proves to be an efficient method of evaluating the candidates. These answers are evaluated against pre-existing datasets.
6. Data science questions
Data science combines maths and statistics with computer science to help tech professionals model and interpret data in meaningful ways. Thus, data science questions should comprehensively vet candidates for their knowledge of different datasets, relevant concepts, and their solution’s accuracy. Candidates applying for data scientist and data analyst roles can be best tested using these questions.
You can vet candidates with concept-based implementation problems by providing them with instructions about the expected output and the respective dataset.
WeCP provides applicants with languages like R and Python, and access to libraries like Pandas and NumPy to facilitate them in the testing process. You must also thoroughly check each solution using different techniques to determine the accuracy.
WeCP (We Create Problems) is an all-in-one tech recruitment solution that provides you with the necessary tools to find the best tech talent. Our platform boasts a rich repository of over 0.2 million questions to evaluate candidates for different, role-specific skills.
WeCP’s integrated solution also comes with AI proctoring, fraud detection, and plagiarism prevention to guarantee fair evaluation.
Start hiring better with WeCP (We Create Problems) today.
