Kumari Trishya

We at HackerEarth love pair programming. Before you call out for being biased though, hear us out. Over the years we have spent perfecting our interview platform FaceCode, we have heard from many hiring managers that using a pair programming interview tool is one of the best ways to assess a candidate’s coding abilities in real time.

Let’s look at what these managers have told us:

• With modern pair programming interview tools, employers must be well-informed about the coders’ unique skills set, ability to collaborate, solve problems, and strong analytical thinking
• Interviewers must be able to deduce the coders’ agility in coding, the complexity of the code used, proficiency in using features such as CodeEditor, auto-suggest, and much more
• A modern interview approach must evaluate how well coders handle ambiguity. It must highlight their attitude toward the challenge and aptitude for learning
• The interviewer learns about the interviewee’s skills and personality, while the interviewee learns about whom they will be working with and what a typical workday looks like

What is pair programming?

Pair programming is a collaborative coding technique where two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the “driver,” writes code while the other, the “navigator,” reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The roles switch frequently to keep both partners engaged. This approach not only improves code quality by facilitating immediate feedback and error correction but also enhances learning and knowledge sharing between the pair. It’s particularly effective in tackling complex problems and learning new technologies. Companies often use pair programming to foster a collaborative environment and develop a more cohesive team dynamic, ultimately leading to more robust and error-free software.

What is a pair programming interview?

A pair programming interview is a style of interviewing candidates where the interviewer and candidate share a coding platform to solve a programming problem together. With pair programming, you can test 3 skills in developers: problem-solving, teamwork, and communication skills.

It can be a great way to identify talented developers. That’s not to say pair programming interviews (a.k.a pair coding interviews) can not go wrong.

DISCLAIMER: No known coders have been harmed during pair programming interviews. Also, breath mints are just good to carry along for any scenario. Just saying.

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Laughs aside, the main reason why pair programming interviews go south is that the rules of engagement are not specified; or followed. As a wise man said, a football game without rules is just a brawl. So, let’s list down some of the oft-repeated mistakes in a pair coding interview and how one can avoid them.

Pair Programming Interview Mistakes

Mistake 1: Not agreeing on rules beforehand

Pair programming has a simple structure. There’s a DRIVER and a NAVIGATOR. Simply put, the driver writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in.

There are many ways this driver-navigator relationship can work:

• Ping-Pong pairing: In this Developer A starts the process by writing a failing test or the ‘PING’. Developer B then writes the implementation to make it pass i.e. the ‘PONG’. Each set is then followed by refactoring the code together.

• Strong-style pairing: In this, the navigator is usually the person who has more experience with the setup or task at hand, while the driver has lesser experience (with the language, the tool, the codebase, or because they are fresh out of college). The experienced person usually ends up being in the navigator role and guides the driver.

• Pair development: Pair development is not a ‘style’ of pair programming per se. It’s more of a methodology. While the above two styles can be used for developing code in real time, pair development can be used to create a user story or feature. This goes beyond just coding and allows the pair to handle many different tasks as a team.

So, before you invite a candidate over for a code pair interview, ensure you know which style you are going to use and lay down the rules clearly. If you are switching roles between driver and navigator, make sure that the rules of discussion and expectations are clear from the get-go.

Mistake 2: Lack of proper conflict resolution mechanisms

It is important to settle conflicts well as a pair, and one way of doing it is to agree at the outset on which role has the final say. Between the driver and the navigator, one role needs to have the ‘casting vote’.

That said, this mechanism should not deter either of the pair from asking questions, or raising red flags. The goal of the pair programming role is to provide the candidate with something close to a ‘real-world experience’, i.e. they work on actual problems that your team solves in their workday. At the same time, the interviewer gets a first-hand glimpse at the candidate’s problem solving skills, and ability to collaborate.

Don’t forget this in an attempt to be ‘right’ during your pair programming routine. Agreeing to a mutually suitable arrangement at the outset aligns expectations and provides a fairly straightforward method of conflict resolution.

Mistake 3: Thinking there is just one ‘right’ answer

There are 11287398173 ways to write FizzBuzz. Remember this when you are in the middle of your next pair programming interview.

As interviewers, a very easy mistake to make is to believe that there is just one right way to approach a problem. Experienced hiring managers know that while it is perfectly alright to usually have an answer in mind to a given question, it is also important to listen and see what the interviewee’s answer is.

Most of the time, you’ll find that the candidate’s approach is different from yours. If you keep an open mind, you might even be surprised by their creativity! Rigidity in thought is a no-no for any interviewer; this typically demonstrates that they are not open to new ideas and only serves to alienate candidates.

This is also important for interviewees. Many times, candidates get trapped in the rabbit hole of ‘pleasing’ the interviewer. They look for solutions that they think will appease the interviewer. It is important to be aware of this behavior. Use the opportunity to showcase your skill-set, instead of behaving like a mind reader and trying to say and do things that will impress the manager. Ask clarifying questions, understand the boundary conditions or the corner cases, and then do your own thing!

Mistake 4: Not communicating enough

Okay, we get it. Not everyone likes chatter when they are coding. Some coders like music, others like radio silence.

The whole purpose of a pair-programming interview is to communicate. Let’s rephrase that a bit. The sole purpose of a pair-programming interview is to communicate effectively with your partner and build something collaboratively.

Interviewers need to set the tone here. Please tell your candidates clearly what kind of communication you expect from them. Do you want them to finish their coding and then walk you through their code, or do you want a play-by-play commentary? While doing so, please be cognizant of the fact that you do not come across as intimidating, and allow the candidate the flexibility to understand and solve the problem in their own time and space.

Interviewees would do better to ditch the YOLO approach on this one and use the session to show their planning and communication skills.

Benefits of pair programming interviews

Pair programming interviews offer a number of benefits to both employers and candidates.

Benefits for employers:

Assess real-time problem-solving skills: Pair programming interviews allow employers to see how candidates approach and solve problems in a real-time setting. This is much more informative than traditional whiteboard interviews, which can be more artificial and less indicative of a candidate’s actual coding skills.

Evaluate communication and teamwork skills: Pair programming interviews also allow employers to evaluate candidates’ communication and teamwork skills. This is important because tech workers often need to be able to work effectively with others on complex projects.

Identify potential culture fits: Pair programming interviews can also help employers to identify potential culture fits. By observing how candidates interact with each other and with the interviewer, employers can get a better sense of whether candidates would be a good fit for the company culture.

Benefits for candidates:

More skill-oriented process: Pair programming interviews give candidates a more realistic opportunity to demonstrate their skills. Candidates are able to work with the interviewer to solve a problem, and they are able to ask questions and get feedback as they go. This can help candidates to perform better than they might in a traditional whiteboard interview.

Better understanding of the company culture: Pair programming interviews also give candidates a better understanding of the company culture. By interacting with the interviewer and seeing how the interviewer works, candidates can get a sense of how the company values collaboration and teamwork.

Opportunity to network with potential colleagues: Pair programming interviews can also be an opportunity for candidates to network with potential colleagues. By working with the interviewer, candidates can learn more about the company’s projects and technologies. Candidates can also make a good impression on the interviewer and other potential colleagues.

Tips to conduct a pair programming interview

Ensuring your pair programming interviews are effective requires a balanced approach:

Set clear expectations: Before the session, clearly communicate the objectives, tools to be used, and the problem’s scope.

Use real-world scenarios: Instead of abstract problems, use challenges that reflect real tasks your team faces. This provides valuable insights into the candidate’s practical skills.

Ensure role clarity: Specify who is the “driver” (the one writing the code) and the “observer” (the one reviewing and suggesting) and switch roles midway to ensure a balanced assessment.

Prepare a list of pair programming interview questions: Create a list of pair programming interview questions to check the candidate’s ability to design code

Maintain respectful communication: Encourage open dialogue. The candidate should feel comfortable asking questions, suggesting alternatives, or admitting when they don’t know something.

Embrace silence: Allow the candidate to think. Not every moment needs to be filled with talk.

Provide tools and documentation: Ensure the candidate has access to necessary tools and can refer to documentation if needed. This mirrors real-world conditions.

Focus on the Journey, NOT just the Solution: Remember, the goal is to understand how the candidate thinks and collaborates. A perfect solution isn’t the only indicator of a good fit.

Conclude with feedback: Dedicate the last few minutes to provide feedback. Highlight what went well and areas of improvement. This can be incredibly valuable for both the candidate and your company’s reputation.

When done right, pair programming can yield awesome results!

These are just some of the things we have learned from our discussions with hiring managers and candidates. We hope that they help you in your next interview. Another important aspect of a good pair programming interview is using the right tool, and HackerEarth’s FaceCode can help you with that. The key to having a good technical code pair interview is creating a familiar environment for the candidates, so they can relax and focus on the task at hand. FaceCode, with its built-in code editor and easy-to-access question library, allows you to do that easily.

We hope you ace your next pair programming interview – whether you are an interviewer or a candidate. Good luck!

Hiring in the post-pandemic world is harder than ever. As recruiters, you would have already heard about the Great Resignation, and how tight the job market is. Given that this climate is unlikely to change anytime soon, recruiters still need a surefire way to sift through the clutter and find the right candidates. In such times, maybe it’s not a bad idea to go back to the drawing board and redefine ‘who’ you are looking for. Why? Because knowing your audience is a critical factor in any recruiting strategy, especially when it comes to tech. And we all know that the audience has changed in many ways since the Big C happened to our world. Also, writing down goals has been shown to be intrinsically linked with higher success rates, making you anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to accomplish said goals. So, if you are looking to hire the best and the brightest, writing it down in words (or candidate personas) could actually help you hire better. All on board? Let’s begin!

What is candidate persona?

A candidate persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal job candidate. It’s developed based on a combination of data and research, encapsulating the skills, experiences, motivations, and attributes of a person who’d be a perfect fit for a specific role within your organization. Much like customer personas help marketers identify their target audience, candidate personas aid recruiters in streamlining their hiring process, ensuring that their efforts are directed towards attracting, identifying, and engaging the most suitable talent for the role.

By understanding and defining a candidate persona, companies can craft more effective job descriptions, target their recruitment advertising more accurately, and enhance the overall hiring experience to appeal to their ideal candidates.

Characteristics to include when creating candidate personas

Demographics: This includes details like age, gender, educational background, and experience level. While these aren’t definitive indicators of a candidate’s fit, they can offer general guidance about where to find potential candidates or what life stage they might be in.

Skillset: Detail the technical and soft skills that the ideal candidate would possess. This not only includes job-specific skills but also transferable skills that might be beneficial to the role.

Professional background: Outline the industries, roles, or companies where the candidate might have previously worked. This provides context to their experience and familiarity with certain work environments.

Motivations: Understand what drives the candidate—whether it’s career growth, work-life balance, a passion for a particular kind of project, or values alignment with a company’s mission.

Career goals: Highlight the aspirations or long-term objectives that the ideal candidate might have, helping to align the role’s potential with their personal and professional growth.

Cultural fit: Describe the cultural attributes or company values that resonate with the ideal candidate. This could relate to collaborative tendencies, innovation, work ethics, or other cultural facets.

Challenges & pain points: Identify common challenges or issues that might dissuade them from joining or staying in a role. This could be things like limited growth opportunities, lack of challenging projects, or a preference for remote work.

Preferred communication channels: Recognize where your ideal candidates spend their time, whether it’s on professional networks like LinkedIn, job boards, industry-specific forums, or even at offline events.

Personality traits: Delve into the softer aspects, like whether they are self-starters, how they handle feedback, their preferred work environment, or their teamwork style.

Step by Step Guide To Creating Candidate Personas

Step 1: Understanding Developer Candidate Personas

Marketing and sales divisions have been using personas to define their ideal buyer for a very long time, especially in strategies like B2B lead generation. This approach helps them understand their audience better and tailor their messaging for maximum impact. Developer personas are an off-shoot of this oft-used strategy; with a few tweaks and changes to make it engineering-friendly. Building developer candidate personas lets recruiters visualize a fictional representation of the ideal candidate for each role. Creating personas lets recruiters get into the mindset of the candidate and tailor the hiring process from the applicant’s viewpoint. This has a direct effect on enhancing the candidate experience. Mostly though, creating developer personas is a great way to understand the ‘why’, ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘where’ of tech hiring.

Sidebar The credit for creating ‘personas’ to identify customers rests with Alan Cooper, a noted software developer. He created ‘user personas’ to predict how different users would interact with software. Angus Jenkinson, a professor of integrated marketing, then took the concept and applied it to marketing. His technique was adopted by OglivyWorldWide and became the gold standard for defining buyer personas as we know them now.

Step 2: Why We Need Candidate Personas

Designing and understanding developer candidate personas helps you do the following:

Create tailor-made JDs: As noted above, once you understand your candidate’s mindset, it becomes easier to tailor your hiring process to attract the right talent. Beginning with the job description.

Optimize recruitment marketing and sourcing: Understanding who you are targeting for a given role will give you better insight into where you can source them. You can curate your recruitment marketing strategies better in this instance.

Integrate diversity hiring initiatives into the process: Building developer personas also helps you identify gaps in diversity hiring, and allows you to build relevant initiatives into your process.

Improve recruitment metrics: Data says that recruiters spend a minimum of 13 hours per week sourcing for a single role. When you have your developer personas mapped out, you can significantly reduce the time spent in sourcing. Over time, you will also see a marked improvement in other recruitment metrics like Time To Hire, Quality of Hire, Offer Acceptance Rate, and so on.

Read More: How Engineering Managers Can Help Recruiters Hire Better

Step 3: Creating A Developer Candidate Persona

The research While you may think you know what a tech role entails, have you ever sat down and done any research to understand what exactly it is your team needs in the next hire to boost performance? Begin by sitting down with relevant stakeholders and learn the details of the role you are hiring for. Understand what a workday looks like for this specific employee, and then add it to your JD. Remember to ask questions about the following:

• • Who is our ideal candidate?
  • Where does this person operate?
  • Why would they want to work for our organization?
  • What kind of experience are we hiring for?
  • What will this employee’s typical workday look like?
  • Are there any specific skills this candidate should have? In addition, what are the core skills and the adjacent skills required for this role?
  • Are there any geographical limitations for hiring?
  • Is it necessary that this candidate have an online presence? If yes, then where should I be looking?
  • Is there a list of competitor employers?

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The skill set It is very important to understand the skill set required for any tech role. We said it above, but it begs repetition. There are some core skills that every developer must possess. Problem-solving, critical thinking, communication skills, and proficiency in the core languages like JAVA and C++ come to mind. There are adjacent skills which a developer can easily pick up on the job, provided they are adaptable and happy to learn new things. Mastering ten different languages is a prime example. It is NOT necessary that your ‘ideal candidate’ be a pro at everything. Your JD should NOT be a dump of requirements that no human can possibly fulfill. Instead, break it down into Must-Haves and Can-Learns and use this to define your personas.

The behavior When hiring someone for a role, recruiters often look at the longevity of the candidate in their company. This can be predicted (to a certain extent) by charting an ideal employee’s behavior traits. Some of these might overlap with the research you did earlier, but it’s never bad to be doubly sure! When adding these subjective elements to your developer persona, ask these questions:

• • What motivated them to apply for this role?
  • Do they have goals this role will help fulfill?
  • How do they best communicate with others?
  • What kind of work environment is best for their work style?
  • What’s most important to them (i.e., salary and benefits)?
  • What’s less important to them (something that often varies by generation)?
  • What do they want from their employer (their strengths, brand recognition)?

The PERSONA Yes! After all that research and brainstorming, it is now time to build your candidate’s persona. Below is a template for defining your candidate persona. You may not be able to answer all of these questions, but the more you answer the better you can adjust your recruiting campaigns and efforts. Click Here For Free Template

And There You Have It!

Once you get the first few personas down, creating additional personas for each new opening will become second nature. You can even get creative with the process. The more candidate personas you are able to define, the easier it will become to navigate the tech recruiting landscape. Personas help not just in terms of bettering your sourcing efforts, but also in shaping other top-of-funnel recruiting activities like advertising, employer branding, awareness, and candidate engagement. We use this persona-creating technique for all our in-house hires, and we can vouch for its effectiveness! We hope this guide helps you create developer candidate personas for your tech team, too. Happy hiring.

It has been well established that you cannot hire a developer unless you see them work on a problem real-time.

For the last eight years, we have observed and figured out flaws in the way the tech world approaches the uber-important ‘interview round’. Let us list them for you:

1. Non-standardized, subjective evaluations due to lack of preparation time: From our conversations with multiple hiring managers and recruiters, we realized that ‘prep time’ is a misnomer. Most interviewers we talked to said they could only manage to start prepping for an interview 15 minutes before it started. A lot of the time, candidate resumes are checked minutes before the actual interview happens. With very little ‘preparation’, interview questions are chosen from a pool of common, generic questions or are made up on the spot. This makes the interview non-standardized as the evaluation parameters are not customized to the role at hand.

2. Time away from ‘core’ function: Finding the right questions to ask your candidate and setting up evaluation parameters is time taking. Add to that the time spent in writing manual feedback, and one can see that hiring managers spend a lot of their working hours taking interviews, and away from their core job function. Here’s a quick calculation of how much time your company loses with inefficient interviews:

‍3. The pain of writing detailed interview summaries: Many hiring managers we talked to said they inadvertently end up delaying their interview feedback at the very last minute due to time crunch. Summarizing an hour-long conversation into succinct points requires a razor-sharp memory and ample patience. When you’re rushing through this part of the process, staying objective is hard and hiring managers tend to use ‘gut feel’ in their feedback. Post-interview feedback in most cases is almost always broken, and the age-old problem of miscommunication between recruiters and hiring managers continues to persist due to the lack of an efficient process.

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We believe all coding interviews should be OBJECTIVE and SKILL-BASED. So, we decided to end these problems for good

With the enhanced version our coding interview platform – FaceCode – we have added to our suite of kickass developer-hiring tools to ensure that the developer-hiring life cycle remains objective and skill-based.

What’s FaceCode you ask? Only the most advanced coding interview tool ever with a host of features that weed out subjectivity and bias from every situation – whether you’re conducting interviews in person or remotely. FaceCode is like noise cancellation for your coding interviews. It cuts out all the unnecessary noise and allows hiring managers to focus on what matters most: SKILLS.

Here’s how FaceCode helps you solve the problems we listed above (and more):

a. Collaborative, real-time code editor with built-in compiler, and question library

Benefit: Assess design problems without navigating away from your interview interface.

System design problems are a necessity in most senior developer interviews. Our collaborative, real-time diagram board helps you evaluate this skill seamlessly for back-end, cloud engineer and other roles.

e. Diversity Hiring Mode - Hides PII

Benefit: Bye bye bias!

FaceCode interviews come with an anti-bias feature. As a hiring manager, if you would like to keep your interviews bias-free you can do so by switching this feature ‘ON’ when you schedule an interview. This hides the candidate’s PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and masks their name with an alias.

[caption id="attachment_28587" align="aligncenter" width="900"] Hide personal details with aliases[/caption]

And there you have it!

HackerEarth has a policy: Don’t Be An Asshole (it’s part of our cultural tenets). Which also means, we aren’t judgmental people. Unless it’s about how you conduct your technical coding interviews :P

A version of FaceCode with fewer features was made available to HackerEarth clients as an add-on to HackerEarth Assessments late in 2019. The platform saw a 4000% increase in the number of interviews conducted between Q3 2019 and Q3 2020. No doubt some of it was driven by the pandemic, but it is also testament to the fact that hiring managers are waking up to the benefits of having an automated coding interview tool that can help them save time and conduct flawless interviews both remotely, as well as in person.

Yes, many users have come back to us to say that they would continue to use FaceCode even in face-to-face interviews because of its time-saving features, and because how it makes interviews supremely objective. This is why we believe that FaceCode is THE definitive way to conduct coding interviews virtually or on-site!

We’ve heard a lot of good things about FaceCode from our users and we’re glad to be launching it publicly! If you are interested in getting a free trial, do write in to our product whizkid Akash Bhat (akash@hackerearth.com).

Join us as we say goodbye to subjective, inefficient, and outdated interview processes, yes? We’ll wait for you.