Brainfood Live On Air - Ep44 pt2 - Assessing Coders - A Brainfood How To with Amy Miller

How do you assess software engineers?

One of the toughest challenges in tech recruiting is how usually non-tech people (tech recruiters) can effectively assess software engineers. 

All the signals are bad...

• Resume / CV ....self reported document, easy to game
• Brand name previous employers.....'must be good because she worked at Google'
• Phone screen....irrelevant testing, using a medium that engineers don't often use
• Face to face interview....rote pitching of questions, looking for bingo buzzword answers. 
• Tech-to-tech interviews.....many critiques of the whiteboard
• Coding challenge....how can recruiters interpret the results?

It's a conundrum which is annoying to recruiters and candidates alike. So what is the best practice for recruiters who want to credibly assess an engineers suitability for a role they are hiring for?

This is the topic of Ep44 of Brainfood Live On Air; I'll be joined by tech sourcing legend Amy Miller formerly of Google and now at Amazon Lab126 , who is going to help me unpack the challenge and together work through some options we might consider. 


Episode 44 of Brainfood Live On Air is supported by our buddies at Codility. Improve your tech hiring efforts with online technical skills assessments to identify the strongest developer hires. Check out more information here.