Assessing the coding skills of a programmer before hiring him/her is one of the difficult challenges prevalent today. There are lot of options available to assess the coding skills such as asking the programmer to write a short code to solve a problem on the spot. You can probably then observe him/her to see how he gets on with the job. Which IDE he uses to code? How fast he codes? What’s the structure the programmer follows? How much of re-typing/erasing he does? How much of syntactical error he commits? How much of external reference he depends on? Whether he uses keyboard short-cuts etc., But there is a problem with observing. First, the programmer might be very conscious about someone watching him/her over the shoulders. Second and more importantly, it’s not possible to observe many programmers if you are recruiting for many positions. The approach is simply not scalable.

TechTestNow strives to solve this problem by providing a scalable platform to assess the coding skills of applicants.

TechTestNow is a web-based practical coding skills/SQL skills assessment platform. The platform is quite intelligent and the team behind it have thought through the solution.

Highlights of TechTestNow

• Web-based compiler interface allows you to conduct real-time practical tests on languages such as C#, VB.NET,  Java, Ruby, PHP, Python and Javascript
• The entire coding sessions is captured and can be played back to see how the candidates wrote their code.
• The SQL skills can be tested against a live database.
• The test can be embedded on third party sites such as monster or naukri and the candidates can take the test then and there.
• The difficulty levels will automatically change as the test progresses.
• Automatic scoring mechanism to benchmark the coding skills.
• Automatic ranking mechanism to benchmark candidates against each other.

We have previously used InterviewStreet to filter the tech candidates or programmers. InterviewStreet offers similar platform but it appears slightly low-tech and lacks certain features.

Once you set up the questions on this platform, you can sit back and relax while the engine automatically filters the candidate for you.