Why locked-down assessments backfire

More reasons to skip the blocked test 

• It doesn’t show real skill. Nobody memorizes code anymore. What matters is whether a candidate can build the solutions your team needs.   

• You’ll lose good candidates. Plenty of engineers will walk away the moment they hear a blocked assessment is part of the process. They could be exactly who you want, and you’ll never know they were interested.

• The data can mislead you. Some people crush restricted tests and struggle on the job. Others bomb them and would have been great hires.

You’re not hiring someone to memorize code. You want someone who sees the big picture and solves real problems with their experience and the tools available.

What assessments platforms can (and can’t) tell you 

Codility, HackerRank, CodeSubmit, and HackerEarth are all popular, and some can be set up as locked environments. They’re fine for baseline proficiency. But they can’t tell you how deep a candidate’s experience goes, how they collaborate, or how they make engineering decisions. For that, you need a real conversation.

How I would run a better technical interview

• Talk through their experience. Have them walk you through a big project: their role, the tech they used, the challenges, and the results.

• Give them a realistic problem. Something close to what they’d actually face at your company. You’ll get a much better read on their coding, their judgment, and how they deliver practical solutions.

• Throw out a hypothetical. A system failure, an architecture disagreement, a performance issue. Ask how they’d approach it, what they’d prioritize, and who they’d pull in. You’ll see how they think, how they communicate, and how they balance tech with business needs.

As my colleague David Ivey, Salesforce Administrator at Goodwin Recruiting, puts it: “It’s always best to talk things through. It’s okay to use AI tools, as long as the candidate proves they deeply understand the overall process. Proving you can code matters, but since AI can help with that now, you need someone who can see AI’s blindspots and tell whether the AI’s answer is right for your business.”

Let us help you find the right engineer 

When you work with the Goodwin Recruiting IT Team, you get fully vetted candidates who fit your needs and your culture. We dig into how candidates think, apply their experience, collaborate, and make technical decisions, because those are better predictors of success on the job than whether they can write code under pressure.