In the past few months, the world of hiring has flipped on its head as we moved from a candidate-driven market to a company-driven market seemingly overnight. Job reqs that would get at most a few tens of applications in the first day of opening are now receiving upwards of 100s of applications and being closed to new applications within a day. While the number of engineering roles have contracted, the number of candidates have increased – posing a bigger problem for hiring managers and recruiters trying to find the best candidates for their role amongst a lot of noise. Inevitably companies end up losing out on great talent because of their interview process taking too long or being too irrelevant, particularly for senior talent.
Companies like Figma, Webflow, and Postscript have adopted Byteboard’s project-based interviews to scale their hiring process, giving more opportunities to find great candidates faster while maintaining high expectations in quality and performance. The Byteboard method of interviewing has proven to work well across thousands of candidates, with a candidate feedback score of 4.46 / 5 and reduction of time to offer by 10 days on average for companies like Figma.
Today we’re expanding our coverage to two of the highest volume roles after Software Engineering across the industry – Data Analysis and Security Engineering to enable top engineering teams to offer the Byteboard experience across most if not all of their open technical roles.
How Byteboard Interviews for Data Analysis and Security Engineering work
As companies collect and store more data, and security concerns continue to rise, the demand for Data Analysis and Security Engineering roles has skyrocketed. As of February of this year, 23% of the open jobs in Healthcare and 29% of the open jobs in Finance were for a Data Analyst position, the highest of any position. Additionally, the occupation of Security Engineers and Analysts is projected to grow by 35%, much faster than the average for all occupations as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hiring for these positions, which require specialized skill sets that differ from more general software engineering roles, is challenging — this is why traditional hiring methods often fail. Byteboard’s skills-based methodology and scenario-style interviews lend themselves to be the best and most comprehensive approach to evaluating for the specialized skills required for these roles.
Security Engineering Interview
Security engineers are the experts at protecting a business’s important assets. They work on securing vulnerabilities in a company’s systems and protecting important digital assets from any potential threats.
In the Byteboard Security Engineer Interview, candidates walk through a real-world scenario where they are asked to perform a security assessment of a new feature, write a script to analyze network logs, and perform a security code review. The result for hiring managers is a comprehensive report on a candidate’s performance on core skills including but not limited too:
- Security technologies and tools: firewalls, antivirus software, intrusion detection systems, encryption, authentication, VPNs, etc.
- Security standards and regulations: NIST, ISO, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, etc.
along with bonus skills like:
- Cloud computing
- Machine learning
- SQL
- Cryptography
Companies hiring for any of the security engineering specializations including Application Security, Offensive Security, and Defensive Security would benefit from offering the Byteboard Security Engineering Interview to all their candidates.
Data Analysis Interview
Data Analysts specialize in the cleaning, processing, analysis, and visualization of datasets. They are not to be confused with Data Engineers and Architects, for which we have a different Byteboard Interview that focuses on building software architecture to support the transmission of data across software systems.
In the Byteboard Data Analysis Interview, candidates walk through a scenario they would often encounter in the wild where they are asked to reason about database structures, write SQL queries, perform exploratory and confirmatory data analyses, and create visualizations and mini-reports. Beyond the Byteboard core strengths like attention to detail, technical reasoning, written communication, the core skills also include skills like:
- Data cleaning and processing
- Data analysis: EDA, CDA, data mining
- Data visualization
along with bonus skills like:
- Statistical modeling
- Regression analysis
- Advanced statistics
If only a glimpse, the comprehensiveness in the skills evaluated in Byteboard Interviews shown above previews a tedious building process our Assessment Development team takes on to ensure we only launch the highest-quality assessments that we trust will provide hiring managers the right signal to make effective and fair hiring decisions. With each new domain expansion, we take on a process that begins with the research and identification of core skills used day-to-day in the industry that ensures our interviews are as relevant to the expectations of the job in the industry today. The high-quality content is paired with our exceptional candidate platform experience that candidates can personalize and designed to model their real-world working environment where they can choose their editor and language of choice.
The introduction of Byteboard Interviews for Data Analysis and Security Engineering — in addition to our existing stack of Software Engineering, Frontend Engineering, Mobile Engineering, Data Engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering — makes Byteboard the leading interview platform in providing high-quality assessments across the most roles, and without doubt a candidate favorite.
“Honestly this was a fun and engaging assessment. The documentation section was extremely engaging and I feel that it gave me the opportunity to really engage with the content and the code section was not in any way obfuscating or inherently overly anxiety-inducing. It was a pleasure to take this assessment and a huge thank you to Newfront for selecting me for this.”
- Recent Byteboard Candidate for Newfront
You can see these new interviews in action on a demo at byteboard.dev/demo or join our incredible Assessment Development team next week as they share insights on the latest trends in hiring for Data Analysis and Security Engineering, and provide practical tips on using assessments to identify top talent. Sign up to receive an invitation here.