Why you should love coding screens
Imagine, you just went through a coding interview. 40 minutes gone in a flash, and then a rejection. This is bogus! How could they assess my technical skill and reject me in 40 minutes! I have years of experience and projects!
Even worse, most companies only make a few offers for hundreds of rejections. This means lots of disheartened interview applicants, and plenty of negativity.
But what if we practiced some perspective taking and looked at it from the other side, that of the company hiring.
Practicing some empathy
Imagine you’re the hiring manager. You post your job and you’re inundated with hundreds if not thousands of resumes per job.
In the old days, you would screen purely on resumes. This meant that you would pick mainly on undergraduate education and previous companies. Unfortunately, there have been tons of studies showing that this has some serious issues.
For example, for new graduates, you might screen for an elite educational institution, which has known biases such as legacy admissions. Even if there were good candidates at other schools, you wouldn’t have time to sort through them.
What about experienced candidates? Because you screen based on previous company experience, and they also screen based on resume, those with the company experiences you want, will also tend to be from elite educational institutions.
Using only resumes, even if there are qualified candidates at other institutions, it’s too difficult to screen everyone, so you end up relying on a screen that excludes talent that may not have had the opportunities or advantages to even get in the door.
Enter automated coding interviews
Fortunately, you’re a thoughtful hiring manager, who understands that there’s talent everywhere, and there’s a better way to screen. So you leverage the power of computers to give everyone an opportunity to at least demonstrate their ability.
Studies have even shown coding interviews are predictive of job performance. Google found structured interviews such as coding screens had significant correlation with job performance.
Rather than screening based on access to scarce resources such as elite educational institutions, you can now screen based on whether someone can actually write functional code, even if it is for a toy problem.
So even though it sucks to get rejected by a technical coding screen, at the very least, you get the following:
- Skill-based assessment that’s correlated with the job
- A way for anyone to demonstrate their skill and get the job
Resumes and previous experience still matter. But they’re not enough. With coding screens, we have a new, fairer, and more accurate way to screen applicants.
