The expert guide for running technical assessments and hiring better candidates

LAST UPDATED: DECEMBER, 2025

On Coderbyte, assessments consist of timed, recorded, and automatically graded tests that candidates take independently consisting of projects, challenges, and questions. Coderbyte can be used for any skill or knowledge-based role, from engineering to customer support.

In terms of workflow, assessments are sometimes used early on immediately after resume reviews or phone screens. But they can also include rigorous take-home assignments at the end of a recruiting process to help identify the best candidate amongst finalists. In either case, the primary goal for recruiting teams should be accuracy, completion rates, and cheating detection, which can be accomplished by following the best practices below.

Design assessments that match the required real-world skills. Ensure that the platform you select has a vast library for skills that you’re hiring for, or that lets you create your own in-depth questions. On Coderbyte, you can customize a template or automatically transform a job description into an assessment using AI. Exclusively using algorithmic challenges or logic questions simply evaluates which candidates spent the most time preparing but isn’t generally an effective way to evaluate candidates for most modern roles.
Decide how and when you want candidates to use AI. It’s imperative to separate foundational skills that candidates should demonstrate independently, and hands-on skills that candidates can showcase with the most advanced AI models. Both are important on the job, so assessments should contain challenges where AI is disallowed and detected, as well as projects where AI is embedded.
Be generous about which candidates you give a chance. The purpose of assessments is to facilitate data-driven recruiting decisions. While you don’t want to ask obviously unqualified candidates to waste their time taking an assessment, you also don’t want to overly restrict which candidates you invite. Coderbyte offers subscriptions with unlimited candidates so that you don’t need to introduce bias at the top of the recruiting funnel, and can instead give more candidates an opportunity.
Optimize for completion rates. One of the paradoxes of assessments is that the least qualified candidates are often the most motivated to take them, since they have fewer career options. The longer you make an assessment, the more you’ve inadvertently filtered out your best candidates. Find ways to shorten assessments by including as few challenges and questions as possible to evaluate the critical skills. Once you’ve done that, we recommend that employers set time limits to no more than 90 minutes, weight scoring for the most important sections, and adjust the qualifying score to enable your hiring team to focus on just the top 5-20 candidates to interview.
Maintain the integrity of your hiring process. Cheating and bad actors are unfortunately rampant in all forms of standardized testing and credentialing. Unfortunately, many legacy platforms and new entrants take naive approaches to cheating detection that give you a false sense of test integrity. Assessments should always have a webcam component, whether for proctoring or video responses. They should also offer screen recording and question randomization as added measures.
Prepare candidates for success. As the employer, you have full context about the assessment and recruiting process. But for candidates that genuinely want to be fresh and prepared, the process can vary greatly from company to company, causing a lot of stress. It’s important to include in your email invitations clear information about how long the assessment should take, what skills they’ll be tested for, and what the next steps are after completing the assessment. You can even send candidates a public link to a practice assessment so they can familiarize themselves with the assessment experience.
Integrate assessments seamlessly into your recruiting process. When it comes to recruiting, speed is a competitive advantage. Integrate your assessment software with your recruiting management tool or ATS to automate assessment invites based on candidate stage, reporting upon assessment completion, and scheduling next steps. You can integrate Coderbyte with any ATS, like iCIMS, Greenhouse, Ashby, and Workday, along with 100+ tools on Zapier like Slack and Airtable.