I’m often asked about CodinGame’s business model.
“Since anyone can access the platform, solve puzzles and play coding games for free, how do you guys make money?”
Long story short: we sell technical solutions to companies to help them hire and retain great developers.
Disclaimer: I’m not trying to sell our product to you. That’s not my job anyway. I’m merely giving you a glimpse of what’s behind the curtains.
Time Is Money
Until you’ve taken part in a hiring process from a recruiter’s side, you can’t realize how difficult, long and costly hiring people can be.
The main goal of CodinGame Assessment, our solution, is to help recruiters save time in their recruitment process by assessing candidates’ skills.
Concretely, it allows companies to:
- Create and send online technical tests with MCQ (Multiple Choice Questions), free text questions and code questions*
- Compare and analyze the results once candidates have taken the tests
*Code questions are the closest things to easy and medium puzzles on CodinGame. More on that below.
So companies save time by automating part of their interview process, filtering out early on candidates who won’t fit, and avoiding mis-hires, which cost a lot.
Testing candidates enables recruiters and HR representatives to have a first and rapid look at a candidate’s technical skills. The hiring process doesn’t start and end there, though.
Our clients pay a lot of attention to the candidates’ human fit, soft skills and motivation. They’re able to use the saved time to get to know the candidates better and evaluate if they would be a great fit for the position and the company.
CodinGame Assessment tests are just another tool for recruiters to use to help them make an always risky decision. To that end, we aim to make our tool as efficient and relevant as possible.
Enhancing the Recruitment Experience
CodinGame was built with the objective of bringing recruiting back to a meritocratic model: fair and based on skills. Every day, awesome candidates are disqualified because of their résumé. That’s a shame.
We want to give the same chance to everyone, regardless of their origin or curriculum. We’re really proud to allow companies to spot hidden gems that they would have normally ignored or missed with a classic process.
Using Assessment tests also sends a positive signal to candidates. First, it shows them the company cares more about their proficiency than their diploma. Second, the CodinGame platform having quite a nice reputation 🎉, it shines on the recruiters who use our technology.
Product Demo
Let’s dive into the product so you get an idea of how it looks and works.
An example of a code question for a candidate
Reminds you of the CodinGame IDE, doesn’t it? The main difference lies in the “Test code” panel. Candidates are allowed (and encouraged) to create their own tests to validate their code on certain edge cases.
There is a time limit for each question. We recommend that our clients limit the duration of tests to 1 hour maximum.
A candidate report: results and details of the points
Unlike CodinGame tests, an assessment test case can check if a specific method is used.
The recruiters can override the number of points they want to attribute to each solution and expected characteristics. After tests are taken, they can check the candidates’ code and decide to give them points even if it fails the validators.
The administration dashboard with the results of all candidates
Recruiters can analyze the results by language and skill for each candidate. The administration side of CodinGame Assessment allows the recruiters to customize a lot of things. They can reuse CodinGame questions or create their own.
One of my best screenshots…
We’ve worked on integrating our own interview tool (a little like Skype) inside CodinGame so recruiters can carry on with the hiring process and have a face-to-face interview with a live code editor.
The list of technologies we support
Over the past year, we have spent a great deal of time improving the product, and we’re pretty happy with the results. We have added a lot of content, too: questions on specific technologies requested by our clients.
The Future of Testing
CodinGame Assessment lets recruiters evaluate candidates on any topic. Sure, today we specialize in tech recruitment, but some of our clients actually use the tool to run non-programming tests: English tests or mechanical engineering tests, for example. These tests don’t contain any code questions, only free text questions or MCQ.
Who knows, one day, CodinGame Assessment could help hire marketers. Or even community managers? As a matter of fact, I passed a technical test before getting hired here because they thought I was applying for a developer position 😎.
Today, the majority of questions aren’t gamified like the exercises on CodinGame. Some of our clients have requested to be able to create more gamified exercises to improve their candidate’s experience. That’s a direction we could be heading to.
Screening, Sourcing, Team Building
If you’re familiar with CodinGame, you probably know that we have other activities which we’re developing on top of the screening for developers.
On the one hand, we’re trying to match developers open to opportunities to offers coming from our network of companies looking to hire. It’s quite localized for now, but we intend to expand the horizons for this in the coming year.
On the other hand, we’ve been organizing sponsored contests* for some years now — both public contests with one sponsor like Roche or Warner Bros and private ones (or semi-private). For example, we’ve been working for 3 years with Amadeus to organize a team-building event at their HQ every year.
*Reminder: community contests are not sponsored.
I hope I’ve shed some light on our activities and on what makes the CodinGame adventure possible, and that everything is clear to you. If you have any questions or suggestions, shoot!
And if you’d like to know more about our solutions, ping me at [email protected] and I’ll redirect you to the people in charge 🙂