Resumes, interviews and generic tests often fall short of showing how a candidate will perform in a technical role. Hands-on coding lets 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 technical hiring tools: live coding interviews, Code Project questions, and dedicated Code and SQL questions. Each one evaluates a different part of a candidate's technical skill set, from live problem-solving to independent, real-world project work. This article walks you through each one and where to go for more detail.

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 shared code editor with live cursors, so you see what the candidate does 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 an embedded AI assistant with ChatGPT and Claude models. 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 include their own video call, so the conversation and the code stay in one window. When the interview ends, its report keeps the candidate's final code, their AI assistant conversation and your interviewer notes, and you rate the candidate there.

Click here for an in-depth guide on Live Coding Interviews.

Canditech's Code 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 in VS Code in the browser, rather than a single function or code snippet. It starts from a ready-made project for your tech stack, with a terminal and run, debug and test tools, so candidates can start working right away. Hidden tests you add score their work when they submit.

Note: Code Project questions are in Beta. If your account doesn't have them yet, clicking the Code Project card in the question type picker opens a Request access form.

Click here for an in-depth guide about Code Project Questions.

Click here for more information on reviewing a Coding Project question in a candidate's session.

Canditech also offers dedicated Code and SQL questions to evaluate technical skills directly. Combine them with video, cognitive and personality tests to get a full picture of a candidate, not just their coding ability.

Code questions ask candidates to implement a function from the requirements you provide, in a single-file code editor, and run their code in the programming language they choose from the ones you allow.

Code questions are scored automatically against the test cases you define. Depending on your plan, you can also add AI scoring: pre-built agents grade the solution's time and space complexity, and custom rules you write check anything else, such as the use of recursion. A strong fit when hiring engineers and developers.

Click here for more information on creating Code Questions.

SQL questions ask candidates to write a query that retrieves or manipulates data from a database you provide. Their submission is scored automatically by comparing its output with 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.

Click here for more information on creating SQL Questions.