Nearly 60% of Developers Know Someone Who’s Cheated on an Interview Coding Test, per New Survey from Filtered

Technical hiring process isn’t working well for many candidates — that’s the main takeaway from a new survey released by skills based hiring platform Filtered. The full results gauge developers’ feelings on topics including the use of coding tests, how long the interview process should last, and the mistakes companies make when hiring.

According to the results, one of the biggest challenges in the technical hiring process today is the inefficiency of generic coding tests for both candidates and employers as a measure of skill. Although these tests are common, they are ripe for fraud, with 57% of respondents saying they know someone who has cheated on a coding test as part of an interview process. Furthermore, 56% of respondents believe that coding tests do not effectively determine if they have what it takes to be successful in the role.

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“Employers need to know if candidates have the skills to do a job, but from this data and anecdotal experience, it’s clear that generic coding tests aren’t the way to figure that out,” said Dan Finnigan, CEO of Filtered. “Our data also shows that candidates want a real understanding of what a job will be like before they sign on. Understanding these pain points is what inspires us every day to build a better technical hiring platform, including creating job simulations to replace broken coding tests.”

Filtered fielded this survey to learn more about what works well in hiring today, according to developers, and what needs to be improved. These findings can then be used to continually improve the company’s industry-leading hiring platform. Filtered enables companies to use customized, automatically-graded job simulations that give candidates a true sense of the job’s actual tasks, while moving only qualified applicants to later interview rounds.

The survey was conducted in December and January, and included responses from software engineers, data science/AI practitioners, and IT specialists, among other groups. Additional survey highlights include:

• Respondents identified the biggest mistake in the technical hiring process today as too much focus on whether a candidate went to a top school or worked for a major company and not enough focus on actual skills (38%).
• Candidates want a better understanding of what they will be doing on a day-to-day basis, with over half (56%) stating having clear insight into the tech stack and day-to-day work before accepting an offer is the most important factor in choosing a position.

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• More than half of respondents (57%) expect the interview process to take 2 weeks or fewer.
• According to the survey, how automation is used in the hiring process is important to candidates. Among those who were okay with some automation, reasons why included if it allowed companies to consider more candidates for a role (48%) and if it reduced bias in the interview process (41%).

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