The Best Code Take-Home Project Platforms in 2021
Manage your GitHub take home projects for candidates
All companies hire engineers a little bit differently, but the general flow is as follows:
- Begin with a 1–2 hour coding assessment to automatically screen and filter out candidates who lack the required skills or experience. This typically removes about 60–90% of applicants.
- Then schedule a 1-hour remote interview with real-time coding and whiteboarding.
- After determining that the candidate possesses the sufficient skillset, invite them to an “onsite” (or remote) culture interview. This usually involves giving them a sales demo so they understand the product, and then having their potential coworkers interview them.
- Finally, some companies that have multiple high-quality candidates will offer a take-home project where the candidates spend a few hours building an app and then upload it to a repository where their code can be reviewed and tested. This typically helps to identify a clear top candidate if you can only hire one.
Today, there are countless platforms for each of the above capabilities, and some platforms that offer all three. In this article, I’m going to focus on my experience with platforms for take-home coding projects. I’ll mention the pros and cons of various platforms below.
[Read: The 5 best code assessment platforms for screening software developers in 2023]
GitHub
For companies that are very serious about take-home coding projects, sharing candidates on a GitHub repo and asking them to submit a pull request is probably the best approach. With a new feature called Codespaces, you can now review, comment on, and run code in the browser. Some companies have even been known to pay candidates for lengthier projects, especially if those projects are the company’s real engineering challenges, in order to truly assess skills.
Since all your candidates likely have GitHub, this is a pretty accessible way to conduct take-home projects. However, since this isn’t GitHub’s core focus as a platform, you are essentially duct-taping workflows together and have to deal with the resulting gaps in your hiring process.
Pros
- If you already have an enterprise account on GitHub, there’s no additional cost to running take-home coding projects for candidates on it
- You have endless customization over the project, scope, and workflow
Cons
- Running a manual take-home project workflow on GitHub will make it difficult to keep your recruiting organized and unbiased, and to store your candidate data in one place
Recommended for
- The most prestigious technology companies where top candidates are willing to go through extensive interview processes in order to get an offer
Coderbyte
Website | G2 | Subscription pricing | Pay-per-candidate pricing
With Coderbyte’s Projects capability, you can easily host your take-home and invite your top candidates through the platform. Companies that prefer to use the projects feature rather than automated screening assessments typically already have a take-home project hosted on GitHub that they use, and so Coderbyte can help them manage candidates and track how they are doing with their final project submission. Candidates can then submit their projects with a link to their repository and an explanation of how their code works, and your team can manually review their code.
Pros
- Coderbyte also offers assessment and interviewing so you can run an entire hiring process and store all your candidate data within a single platform.
- You can view and run projects online
- You can seamlessly compensate candidates to increase completion rates
- It’s cost-effective: Coderbyte is the only platform that offers unlimited admins (recruiters/hiring managers), assessments, and candidates on any subscription plan.
Cons
- Coderbyte’s take-home project library is limited so you may need to use or customize your own.
Recommended for
- Tech-forward organizations that can define their own take-home projects and want one platform for managing code screening, assessments, and take-home projects.
CodeSubmit
Unlike other platforms which have a secondary feature for take-home projects, CodeSubmit’s focus is on take-home coding projects for assessing candidates. They support most languages, have a large library of real-world projects that you can use, and offer seamless integration with existing workflows. Candidate submissions then need to be manually graded by your team, as explained in their FAQ:
We believe that technical interviewing should be a reciprocal process. If candidates invest their time in completing the assignment, then the hiring team should invest some time in reviewing them.
Pros
- Great experience for running code assessments with take-home projects
- Straightforward and affordable pricing
Cons
- No true automated code screening or interview capability which means you will likely have to use multiple tools and fragment your candidate data. At that point, there’s only marginal more value than just using GitHub.
- Candidates may not appreciate spending hours building a complex project especially at the early phases of the interview process
Recommended for
- Companies that have the resources to send out take-home projects and manually review candidate submissions
HackerRank
As usual, HackerRank offers the most enterprise-grade feature set. With HackerRank’s Projects capability, you can access a deep library of projects for front-end, back-end, data science, and DevOps roles. HackerRank also offers a Docker container backed, developer-friendly environment with support for multiple files, debugging, autocomplete, linting, git integration, and more, to complete projects within the browser.
Pros
- HackerRank is an all-in-one developer hiring platform, so you can manage everything in one place
- Robust project library that encompasses the most common roles
- The ability for candidates to code in HackerRank’s online IDE or at-home
Cons
- It’s not cheap and you’ll have to go through a lengthy sales process to get a sense of pricing
- The user experience is a bit clunky and outdated
Recommended for
- Large corporations that require and can afford enterprise features like SSO and API access
Byteboard
Byteboard, created by a team working at Google, combines live interviews with take-home projects to change how technical interviews are conducted. A candidate and an interviewer work on a project together, where the solution is then graded manually to consider whether the candidate should move forward in the interview process.
The Byteboard interview replaces pre-onsite interviews across all of your key technical roles with a small, time-boxed project that simulates real-life asynchronous work.
Pros
- A great way to gauge a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses because ample time is spent live-coding with them
- Proves a pleasant, and less stressful experience for candidates during the initial technical screen
Cons
- Companies need significant resources and time to be able to run this sort of interview with candidates because each submission needs to be manually graded
- Not self-serve, so will need to spend some time talking to a salesperson to get started
- Candidates may not appreciate spending hours building a complex project especially at the early phases of the interview process
Recommended for
- Companies that do not want to automate their technical screening process at all and have the resources to conduct length project-based interviews
