We are a mid/small-sized company (~3K) which is hungry for "freshers" (those just out of college). We are out competed by the big sharks who pick the best of the students and we have to search among the remaining. Our hiring pipeline involves a written test (coding - mix of Multiple choice and coding - in favour of only MC nowadays and analytical skills) provided to us by a third party. The test isn't really great (fixed small set of questions which doesnt change, some arcane C coding questions (the likes of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28034019), etc.). So we have 2 rounds of TA (technical assessment) and 1 HR round at the end. This is resulting in a lot of filtering and we get a success ratio of about 4-5 per 1K students.
Management does not like this and blames the assessment team for having "high standards" and feels that we are wasting previous time (of assessors) and not getting desired results. The assessment team feels that the written tests are not a good indicator of coding skill and that most applicants fail in the basics of coding (logic, for loops, pointers etc.). Management has given a new target to reduce the time to hire and increase our hit rate.
The solution will mostly consist of removing HR round (no value add, can be assessed in TA), reducing or eliminating TA (!) and relying solely on the written test. Given the written test quality (though it has mininal configurability in terms of the split between MC and coding questions) this seems likely to get in a lot of "false positives".
My questions - is it really feasible to use only a online automated assessment (not specifically the one we are using) to get a right coding assessment done for freshers? is there a "good" (efficient and effective) "standardized" framework/solution for fresher assessment which one can follow which you have used? (Note: we are a software company providing solutions and consulting in domains like automotive, networks, devices, embedded, etc.)
Management does not like this and blames the assessment team for having "high standards" and feels that we are wasting previous time (of assessors) and not getting desired results. The assessment team feels that the written tests are not a good indicator of coding skill and that most applicants fail in the basics of coding (logic, for loops, pointers etc.). Management has given a new target to reduce the time to hire and increase our hit rate.
The solution will mostly consist of removing HR round (no value add, can be assessed in TA), reducing or eliminating TA (!) and relying solely on the written test. Given the written test quality (though it has mininal configurability in terms of the split between MC and coding questions) this seems likely to get in a lot of "false positives".
My questions - is it really feasible to use only a online automated assessment (not specifically the one we are using) to get a right coding assessment done for freshers? is there a "good" (efficient and effective) "standardized" framework/solution for fresher assessment which one can follow which you have used? (Note: we are a software company providing solutions and consulting in domains like automotive, networks, devices, embedded, etc.)