Selecting Qualified Challenges

In the previous article we covered high-level planning considerations. Now let's jump into the details of picking challenges. In this article we will cover the challenges provided by the Qualified library and how they would be useful to your evaluation process.

Searching

After establishing your goals and audience for the assessment and determining your time constraints, you can begin searching Qualified's library.

The most obvious filter to apply to your searches is the language or technology you're assessing.

When evaluating a list of code and Q&A challenges, you can then use the estimated time, difficiulty and description to gather an initial set of potentially usable challenges for your assessment.

Establishing Buckets

Your high-level approach might yield a series of abstract buckets you wish to fill with concrete challenges. For example, your tentative assessment sketch might begin with a pre-screen style coding challenge of easy difficulty that takes 10 minutes followed by a behavioral questionnaire that takes 10 minutes, followed by a moderate-difficulty coding challenge in the relevant language or framework, followed by a domain-specific technical Q&A.

With this bucket list in mind, you can begin gathering candidates for each bucket from your search results and filling in the gaps, trying different combinations and checking conceptual coverage along the way.

Try It Out!

Remember to preview your selected challenges often. Ask team members and reviewers to give challenges and draft assessments a dry run to ensure flow, appropriate difficulty, integrity and skill coverage. Through this process, many challenges that seem like promising candidates may turn out to be less desirable than initially anticipated, as the testing process will uncover incompatibilities and points where certain skills won't be necessary to test.