CodeSignal assessments are highly customizable and adaptable for a variety of software development roles: front-end, backend, full-stack, DevOps, mobile, data science, and more.
While each company has their own, unique needs with their assessments, CodeSignal recommends following a few "best practices" for designing a technical assessment that provides an accurate signal of relevant skills and which creates a positive test-taker experience.
Keep in mind that these are recommendations, not requirements.
Assessment duration
- Ideal assessment duration: 60-70 minutes
- Why?
- We have found this to be the optimal assessment length to capture an accurate signal from your test-takers (both breadth and depth of knowledge), without deterring test-takers from taking or completing the assessment.
- Test-takers may be more willing to take a longer assessment further down the hiring funnel, when they will be more invested in the role.
- Note: If your company wants to give a difficult initial assessment to filter out as many test-takers as possible, you can design a take-home assignment in CodeSignal Assessments that has an assessment duration of 1-2 days.
Choosing skills to assess
- Ideal number of skills to assess: 1-2 skills per assessment
- How to choose which skills to assess:
- In thinking about which questions to select, always think about the base level of skills that are required for the job instead of going into very specific or difficult skillsets; this is especially important if you are designing a top-of-the-funnel, initial assessment.
- Why?
- Assessing only 1 or 2 skills at a base level will ensure that you don't accidentally rule out qualified test-takers with an initial assessment. We have found it most effective to evaluate more specialized skills at a later stage in the hiring funnel, such as a 1:1 technical interview or an on-site interview. Interviews allow you the opportunity to talk through more complex problems with test-takers in real time.
Number of questions
- Ideal number of questions: 2-3 coding questions, or a mix of 1-2 coding questions and 10-15 quiz questions. When in doubt, assign fewer questions.
- Why?
- In our experience, test-takers can comfortably complete 2-3 coding questions (or 1-2 coding questions and 10-15 quiz questions) in an hour if they have the coding skills needed for basic proficiency at the question.
Question difficulty and variation
- Ideal question difficulty: questions should be split into 3 groups—easy, intermediate, and hard. For initial, top-of-the-funnel assessments, it's generally best to use fairly easy coding questions. If you choose to use a difficult question, start your assessment with easier questions and move to gradually more challenging questions.
- How to assessquestion difficulty: Experts on your team will likely have a good sense of a question's difficulty from its description. For questions in CodeSignal's Question Library, they can also refer to the question's solve rate to estimate its difficulty.
- Ideal question variation: create at least several variations of each questions. Variations should have similar difficulty, descriptions, and solution sizes.
- Why?
- Using easier coding questions at the top of the funnel allows you to cover adequate breadth of knowledge in a 60-70 minute assessment.
- Defining questions as easy, intermediate, or hard makes it easier to ensure the assessment progresses from easier to harder questions and to create different levels of assessments for different roles.
- Having variations of each questions allows you to easily create different version of the same assessment by swapping out each question for a variation. Distributing different versions of a assessment helps mitigate against cheating/plagiarism.
Scoring
- Assigning points:
- Each assessment should consist of 1000 points.
- For an assessment consisting of 3 coding questions, we recommend assigning 350, 350, and 400 points to each respective question.
- For an assessment consisting of 1 coding question and 10-15 quiz questions, we recommend assigning 500 points to the coding question and 500 points to the quiz questions (500 points divided across all quiz questions).
- Why?
- Point allocation that reflects the importance of each question for your overall evaluation of a test-taker makes scoring easier and more accurate. Accurate scoring helps you move forward with the right test-takers.