Coder Platform for Interviews

Most technical assessments follow a common pattern—a technical phone screen that uses an online text editor, and then an in-person interview that uses a whiteboard. By coincidence, most job-seeking developers hate technical assessments. When you force applicants to use more limited tools for a technical interview, you add unnecessary stress to the application process—without revealing anything helpful about their skills and abilities. Instead, why not use an online coding platform that gives applicants every tool they’re used to using?

The average developer hasn’t used a whiteboard or a text editor since college—instead, they’re used to using coding platforms online. With the features of full-fledged IDEs at their fingertips, paired with the ability to use any programming language they’re fluent in, developers can keep up with the extremely rapid release cadence required by methodologies such as Agile or DevOps. Taking these tools away might reveal how many functions a developer has memorized, but it doesn’t really simulate how a developer operates in a real-world context.

Common Coder Platforms vs. Whiteboards and Text Editors

If you want to hire the best employee for your position, your goal should be to simulate (to the best of your ability) what an hour of challenging work would look like at their job. This is where hiring managers run into a dilemma.

Most developers write code using online coding platforms that provide fully integrated development environments. These platforms are difficult to use in a hiring context. You need to provide your candidate with temporary access to your existing development environment, screen recording software to let you play back and review their interview, and so on. This makes it difficult to homebrew a decent technical assessment platform.

Therefore, most interviewers resort to using text editors and whiteboards—anyone can use them. The problem is that this simplification causes interviewees to lose so many features that the interview process is no longer an accurate representation of the work environment. Interviewees lose:

  • The ability to highlight syntax, which makes it easier and faster to read code by highlighting strings, variables, and other elements of a program
  • The ability to use any coding language they want, not just a one that they’ve memorized
  • The ability to autocomplete complex functions instead of having to memorize them
  • The ability to build executables and run programs to see if they work
  • The ability to write test cases and check code quality

In a job interview, you often see promising candidates come to a crashing halt in the middle of an exercise because they typed an underscore instead of a semicolon. This isn’t ideal. You might think that a candidate who remembers to type a semicolon might be better than one who doesn’t, but this kind of thinking selects for rote memorization abilities as opposed to creativity and problem solving.

Instead of making life more difficult for your candidates, it may be best to look for a different kind of coding platform online, one that’s designed to facilitate the interview process without limiting your candidates.

Practice Better Interviews with Our Coder Platform

Enter CoderPad—an online coding platform that’s designed to accurately assess technical candidates throughout the hiring stages. With all the features of an IDE, CoderPad is designed to give candidates the space to do their best work— and interviewers the information they need to hire the right person.

By giving candidates the tools they’re normally used to, applicants will be able to solve interview problems faster. This is, on balance, a good thing. You can interview more candidates in the same period, making it more likely that you’ll find a good hire. If technical recruiting isn’t your full-time position, you’ll be able to get back to your normal role faster, making the hiring process a smaller distraction. Meanwhile, our platform is designed to give you rich insights into the technical interview itself with a number of innovative features.

Coder Platform Features

CoderPad works like an IDE to enable both developer candidates and interviewers to write and run code together in over 30 languages. This means that you can opt for code autocompletion, bracket auto-closure, and syntax highlighting—features built in to make interviews easier and more accessible.

For example, interviewers can build their own questions ahead of time, or even construct take-home projects for screening interviews. These questions can be as detailed as you like—CoderPad even allows you to upload custom files and database environments. This means that you can ask candidates to perform everything from image recognition challenges to SQL queries.

Once it comes time for a more in-depth interview, interviewers can perfectly replicate the experience of an in-person technical assessment. Instead of having to work with screen sharing or video conferencing apps, the interviewer can start a video call from directly inside the application. If the candidate needs to create a system architecture or describe their thought process in a freeform manner, then they can switch over to Drawing Mode as easily as using a whiteboard.

Use Our Coder Platform for Remote Hiring

With CoderPad, tech recruiters can use an easy online coder platform to conduct in-depth assessments that work better than traditional interviews. You’ll be able to more accurately simulate the challenges inherent to the position, and you’ll be able to better assess the way candidates work in response to these challenges. At the end of the day, you’ll be able to hire better candidates, faster.