Resumes, interviews, and generic tests often fall short of showing how a candidate will actually perform in a technical role. Hands-on coding assessments let you see how candidates write, structure, and reason through real code, giving you a clearer picture of their day-to-day ability than a resume or interview alone can.

Canditech offers several ways to evaluate real coding ability as part of your hiring process: live coding interviews, coding project questions, and dedicated Code and SQL questions. Each of these tools evaluates a different part of a candidate's technical skill set, from live problem-solving to independent, real-world project work. This article will walk you through the technical hiring solutions Canditech offers and where to go for more detail on each one.

Canditech's live coding interview feature is a real-time, collaborative session where you and a candidate work together in a shared coding and whiteboarding environment, instead of relying on a static take-home test or a whiteboard-only conversation.

The coding side is a multi-file IDE with live cursors, so you can see what the candidate is doing as they do it, and code runs instantly for immediate feedback. The whiteboard side lets you work through system design, architecture, and technical concepts together in real time. Candidates also have access to embedded AI assistants (like Claude Code and Codex) during the session, which lets you evaluate not just their raw coding ability but how they prompt, direct, and validate AI-generated code, a skill that's becoming part of real-world engineering work.

Live coding interviews run alongside your existing video call (Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, etc.) rather than replacing it, and the full session is recorded for playback later.

For an in-depth guide about Live Coding Interviews, click here

Canditech's Coding Project questions are realistic take-home engineering assignments that allow candidates to work across multiple files and leverage embedded AI assistants to complete more in-depth, real-world coding simulations that better reflect day-to-day engineering work.

Each project runs inside a full IDE, rather than a single function or code snippet, in a pre-built environment ready for candidates to start working in right away.

For more information on creating a Coding Project question, click here.

For more information on reviewing a Coding Project question in a candidates' session, click here.

Canditech also offers dedicated Code and SQL questions to evaluate technical skills directly, alongside video, cognitive, and personality tests, so you get a full picture of a candidate's skill set, not just their coding ability:

Coding questions allow candidates to implement a function based on provided requirements and run their code in various programming languages.

Coding questions are automatically scored against test cases you define, and can optionally be evaluated with AI auto-scoring, which looks at dimensions like code quality, readability, time and space complexity, and adherence to best practices. A strong fit when hiring engineers and developers.

For more information on creating Code Questions, click here.

SQL questions allow candidates to write a query to retrieve or manipulate data from a provided database, and their submission is automatically scored by comparing the output against the expected results. SQL questions are a natural fit for data-focused roles, from data analysts to backend engineers working with databases, and are especially useful when hiring data and BI professionals.

For more information on creating SQL Questions, click here.