If you don’t establish the parameters for what constitutes “cheating” during the assessment, you’re not being fair to the candidate and may pass over candidates who perfectly understand the code they copied.įor example, you might tell candidates that you expect them to build their solution within the assessment platform (compared to in an external development environment), or discourage copying and pasting, if these are the criteria you decided on with hiring managers. That hiring manager’s definition of plagiarism shouldn’t be assumed as universal. Once recruiters have established the hiring manager’s perspective, that information needs to be passed to the candidate before they start their assessment. If your organization is using technical assessments, it is critical for recruiters to sit down with individual hiring managers and discuss their views on plagiarism. Even in the same organization, different hiring managers may have radically different ideas around copying code in the assessment process. When it comes to hiring, most managers have different ideas about what constitutes plagiarism. 1) Establish What Qualifies as PlagiarismĪs mentioned above, copying and re-using code is an expected and encouraged practice in software development. So, if plagiarism can have such a negative impact on hiring manager time, how can we go about combatting it? Below are five methods you can use – both in and outside of the technical assessment – to deter and detect it. 5 Ways to Combat Plagiarism in Recruiting Again, technical hiring managers’ time is some of the most expensive time in the organization. If the assessment can’t distinguish between capable candidates who know what their code does and those who copied it without understanding it, the burden of screening candidates gets pushed back to hiring managers. Plagiarism in this context can actually be counterproductive since it is impossible to distinguish between candidates who understand how the code works and candidates who simply copied someone else’s solution. Unfortunately, this approach is not helpful when the goal is to understand a candidate’s coding proficiency and problem-solving skill in a technical assessment. Doing so both reduces development time and increases reliability since solutions do not need to be developed from scratch. It is absolutely normal for a software developer to use others’ solutions that are readily available online when considering a problem. Often, there are multitudes of solutions posted online for any given programming problem and no particular solution is the best for all potential applications of that code.ĭuring real-world software development work, it is expected to do research on existing solutions before tackling the task at hand. Plagiarism in Technical AssessmentsĬomputer programmers are constantly solving a vast array of technical problems. That said, the proliferation of coding challenges (and the lucrative nature of programming jobs) has led to an increase in the number of candidates who attempt to game the system. Technical assessments – usually in the form of coding challenges – are designed to test the skills and competencies required of capable developers. This is why many organizations turn to the technical assessment. You shouldn’t expect them to spend hours reviewing resumes or conducting phone screens when they could be managing teams and shipping product. Technical hiring managers’ time is expensive. Leverage some sort of technical skills assessment.Involve hiring managers early in the hiring process. ![]() To adequately gauge candidates’ abilities, most technical recruiting teams are left with one of two options: While much of this is due to a shortage of capable coders, software developers also possess a unique skill set that is difficult for recruiting teams to screen. Most companies struggle to attract and hire technical talent.
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