Technical Assessments: How We Guarantee Our Seniors Are Truly Seniors
Developer technical assessment
There is nothing more frustrating for a Tech Lead than scheduling an hour of their day to interview a supposed “Senior Java Developer,” only to discover in the first 10 minutes that the candidate doesn’t understand basic concepts of memory management or concurrency.
The term “Senior” has been devalued in the market. Years of experience do not equal code quality. At Koud, we understand that your time is the most expensive asset in your department. That’s why our promise is simple: if the candidate makes it to your final interview, it’s because they already have the technical level to do the job.
Here we reveal the “black box” of our developer technical assessment and why only 3% of applicants make it into our talent pool.
The Koud Filter: Beyond Keywords
Many generalist recruiters look for keyword matches in a PDF. If it says “React” and “5 years,” it passes the filter. That is a costly mistake.
To hire a real senior developer, we flip the equation. Our filtering process is designed and executed by engineers, not generalists.
The 3% Funnel
For every 100 applicants who claim to be Seniors:
- Initial Screening: 60 are discarded due to lack of fluent English or inconsistencies in their career path.
- Algorithmic Challenge: 25 fail to solve optimized computational logic problems (Big O Notation).
- Live Coding & Architecture: Of the remaining 15, only 3 demonstrate the ability to design scalable systems in real-time.
Those 3 are the only ones you will meet.
Live Coding: The Moment of Truth
Take-home challenges are obsolete; nowadays, anyone can ask ChatGPT to solve them. The only way to validate seniority is to see the engineer think under pressure.
Our live coding tests sessions do not seek for the candidate to memorize syntax, but to demonstrate:
- Problem Solving: How do they approach an ambiguous problem?
- Clean Code: Do they write code that other humans can understand and maintain?
- Debugging: What do they do when the code fails? (Because it will always fail at some point).
A true Senior is not the one who writes code the fastest, but the one who knows what code not to write to avoid future technical debt.
Architecture and System Design
Knowing how to code is necessary, but knowing how to design is what defines a Senior. At Koud, we evaluate if the candidate can make high-level decisions:
- Monolith or Microservices? Why?
- SQL or NoSQL for this specific use case?
- How would you handle a traffic spike of 1 million users?
If you are looking for an architect or a technical lead, you need someone who understands the consequences of these decisions before writing the first line of code.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I apply my own technical tests to Koud candidates?
Of course! In fact, we encourage it. Our filters are there to save you time, but you have the final decision. Most of our clients are pleasantly surprised to see that our candidates pass their internal tests with ease.
What technologies do you evaluate?
We evaluate the entire modern stack: from Backend (Java, Python, Node, Go) and Frontend (React, Angular, Vue) to Mobile (iOS, Android, Flutter) and Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP).
Do you evaluate Soft Skills in addition to code?
Yes. A genius who cannot communicate is a liability to the team. We evaluate communication, intellectual humility, and mentorship capacity.
Conclusion
Stop playing Russian roulette with your interviews. Hiring IT talent shouldn’t be an act of faith, but a process of technical certainty.
At Koud, we do the dirty and hard work of filtering, testing, and validating, so you only have to worry about one thing: choosing the best candidate for your culture.
Want to see how a true Senior performs?
Stop interviewing fake profiles. Access our Top 3% of pre-validated talent.
