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A technical skills assessment platform helps recruiters and hiring managers conduct pre-employment screening for technical roles efficiently at a large scale. Also known as technical skills screening software, CodeSignal offers cloud-based assessment solution powered by professionally-designed tests and proprietary predictive Coding Score.

Tech recruiters and engineering hiring managers use a technical skills assessment platform to gain deep insights into candidates’ skills and abilities. Measuring skills allows them to make data-driven decisions, improve process efficiency, and reduces bias in recruiting.

A great assessment solution should be able to:

• Design highly consistent and well researched assessments
• Deliver reliable tests via a state of the art platform
• Analyze results in comparison to the rest of the developer population

CodeSignal’s Technical Skills Assessment platform features:

• Highly consistent and valid professionally-designed tests
• Advanced Cloud IDE supporting 70+ coding languages, frameworks and libraries
• Predictive Coding Score

If you’re hiring engineers, having the ability to assess candidates’ technical skills enables you to create a fair and efficient hiring process that leads to the best candidates for the job. A technical screening tool allows you to create a data-driven recruiting process by focusing on abilities, not proxies like former employers or education institution.

A technical screening tool can help tech recruiters and hiring managers at every size company – from early stage startups where every hire is critical to large enterprises who hire talent at a large volume – go beyond resumes and assess technical skills.

Data-driven recruiting and technical skill assessments:

• Reduce Bias and Increases Diversity
• Opens up candidate pool at top of funnel
• Saves time by focusing only on qualified candidates
• Reduces skill gaps at an organization
• Quality of hire increases

Many organizations today have implemented some form of technical skill assessment into their hiring process. This might look like a take home test, a whiteboard assignment, or your engineering team crafting their own skill assessment questions.

There are many problems with measuring technical skills in these ways, including they often produce inconsistent measurements, are not EEOC compliant, and questions often get posted online.

That’s why working with technical skills assessment companies with expertise in test design is critical when implementing and designing pre-employment testing solutions.

At CodeSignal, we use framework-based assessments, which create recipes for what we’re measuring and how we’re measuring it.

The benefits of framework-based assessments are:

• An endless number of tests which lead to an increase in integrity in results
• Accuracy and validity of results by deliberate measurement
• Coding Score that puts test-taker’s performance in context against the global developer population

TLDR: Yes!

CodeSignal not only has an extensive library of predefined questions, the CodeSignal Test Design Team also works directly with our customers to consult on the overall test design.

For fundamental programming ability and other common coding language skills, CodeSignal has a turn-key solution that takes care of test design work for you. Our Certification Tests are developed based on the CodeSignal Research team’s testing frameworks and calibrated based on robust sample data. So you can rest easy knowing that your tests will produce accurate and consistent results that you can make hiring decisions on.

All of our Certification Tests go through a rigorous validation and adverse effect study. Another benefit of using framework-based assessments is in cheat proofing. Dynamic question rotation of a large question set ensures that studying our questions ahead of time is practically impossible. Doubled with our advanced plagiarism checker, you can trust that our test results without any worries.

However, if you are hiring for a specialized role and would like to create an assessment, our professional test design team is here for you. Get in touch to learn more.

We recommend using our General Coding Assessment (GCA) through CodeSignal Certify to analyze junior engineer skills. This framework-based assessment measures core programming fundamentals and computer science knowledge. You can also review their results breakdown into test-taker’s code-writing and problem-solving skills as well as the ability to produce clean code at a reasonable speed.

A great thing about our GCA is that it is measured using our Coding Score, which acts like a credit score for their technical skills and highly predictive of their performance on their on-site interviews and their jobs. The score also brings the context around the particular test-taker’s skill level against the global developer population. This allows you to easily understand their skill levels and decide whether they’re the right junior engineer for you!

Rather than relying on a new engineer’s educational institution, test their technical skills!

The biggest difference between CodeSignal and other technical skill assessment platforms is our assessment philosophy.

We believe that a great assessment solution should be able to:

• Design highly consistent and well-researched assessments
• Deliver reliable tests via a state of the art platform
• Analyze results in comparison to the rest of the developer population

We’ve invested heavily in our test design research and pioneered the ‘framework-based assessment` methodology to develop assessments that produce consistent and accurate results. Our framework-based assessments are also leak-proof and fully managed by CodeSignal. You don’t have to maintain the test by constantly creating new questions yourself.

We have one of the most advanced cloud IDEs which supports 70+ coding languages, frameworks and libraries. So you can test candidates for a variety of technical roles. Test-takers can write, edit, and run codes as they do in a real development environment. The collaborative editing feature coupled with a video chat enhances both remote and in-person interview experiences.

Our assessment results analysis does not stop at automatically scoring the points. Our proprietary Coding Score is highly predictive of candidate’s performance in the later rounds of interviews and on the job.

This simple yet powerful metric enables non-technical technical recruiters to make data-driven decisions by being able to easily understand a candidate’s proficiency level.

CodeSignal’s advanced coding environment supports over 70+ coding languages, frameworks and libraries. In addition to the standard single-file coding challenges, we support filesystem-enabled coding challenges that simulates the real development environment. You can assess a variety of roles using CodeSignal such as full-stack, backend, frontend, devops, mobile, data scientist and more.

Languages & Libraries
We support over 40 different coding languages including the widely used ones such as Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, React, Ruby, Swift, and more. Here is the full list of languages and related libraries we support.

Unit Test Frameworks
CodeSignal’s state-of-the-art IDE supports a number of unit test frameworks. Some of the examples include:

• NUnit for .NET Framework
• xUnit or NUnit for .NET Core
• JUnit for Java
• Mocha/Chai for JavaScript
• PHPUnit for PHP
• unittest for Python
• RSpec for Ruby
• UI tests using Galen
• UI functionality tests using Puppeteer

Coding Score is a measurement of a developer’s overall implementation and problem-solving ability. CodeSignal’s Coding Score is a credit score equivalent for technical recruiting that measures technical skills from ranges between 300 and 850.

A candidate takes one of our framework-based assessments designed to measure a specific category of software engineering skills – General Coding, JavaScript, Java, or Data Science. They solve a variety of problems at variable difficulties in a given time, much like the SAT. After, the test is scored based on a variety of factors including:

• Maximum average score (ms) which is the max score one will get by solving all tasks in average time.
• Maximum quiz score (mq) which is the maximum score one will get by solving only the quiz tasks (if any).
• Max variation (mv) which is how much the score may vary (from the score that one would get when solving that set of tasks in average time, without incorrect attempts) based on speed, code quality and incorrect attempts.

The Coding Score obtained from the test is a singular measure meant to give recruiters, hiring managers and educators – as well as the test-takers themselves – a quick view of the test-taker’s skills. It measures the test taker’s code-writing and problem-solving skills as well as the ability to produce clean code at a reasonable speed.

Framework-based test design is a widely accepted approach to creating tests in the overall assessment category. Tests like the SAT, GRE, GMAT and TOEFL are not created by picking a handful of questions from a question library. Instead, those tests are backed by a specific framework that lays out what the test aims to measure, how it measures it and how it’s scored.

The framework also acts like a recipe enabling the test design team to make many different copies of the same test that are highly consistent with each other but prevent test takers from leaking and collaborating on solutions.

Framework-based test design has various benefits over traditional technical skill assessments including:

• No maintenance cost. Your engineering team doesn’t need to worry about designing your tests.
• Dynamic tests that can’t be leaked.
• High consistency and validity between different versions of the same test.
• No liabilities and validation studies that help support EEOC compliance.

See examples of CodeSignal assessment frameworks here.

CodeSignal offers three different plans: Starter, Professional and Enterprise. Each plan can consist of all or a combination of our three products — Certify, Test, and Interview. More information about each plan can be found here.

CodeSignal’s Certify features our certified proctored coding assessments.

CodeSignal’s Test pairs our team of professional test designers and content engineers with your team to deliver tailored assessments that test for the skills required for your niche job.

CodeSignal’s Interview is typically an add-on solution that enables live video interviews.

We like to work with our customers to understand the data-driven recruiting process they want to implement and their needs. We then recommend a custom package that fits your exact needs.

This means pricing is highly flexible. Let’s talk about it!