Today’s topic

How Einride used Alva’s coding tests to assess top engineering interns

When considering the future of freight mobility, Einride is a name that immediately comes to mind. 

As a leading provider of digital, electric and autonomous shipping technology, Einride’s success in the field largely depends on having the right people on their team.

For Einride, assessing engineering talent is about “seeing how developers solve problems day-to-day. We want to see how candidates can find their way through the technologies we use.”

The challenge

In the summer of 2021, Einride’s Chief Software Architect, Oscar Söderlund, needed to set up an internship for entry-level engineers. 

As the person primarily responsible for Einride’s tech interview process, Oscar sat down with engineering colleagues to map out the internship.

It quickly became evident that while the team were well-versed in interviewing candidates for mid-level to senior positions, hiring interns was unfamiliar territory.

Hiring efficiently without sacrificing quality 

Having interviewed engineers for past positions, Einride already had a checklist for running coding assignments for candidates.

Before launching the summer internship program, Oscar and the hiring team just needed to calibrate the coding tasks to ensure it suited entry-level engineers. 

Subsequently, they adjusted the scope, added a set of automated tests, and were ready to go. 

Or so they thought.

As soon as Einride published the job listing, their inbox overflooded with hundreds of applications.

The team quickly realised they couldn’t stick to their regular interview flow, where an engineer from the hiring team would manually code review each candidate’s submission.

Pressed for time, would they find those difference makers and shortlist only the most promising candidates for the internship?

Einride started researching coding test providers to help them with their screening challenge, only for another question to crop up.

Whatever test provider they opted for, they needed to ensure that the tech assessments themselves worked with tools like GitHub and Teamtailor’s ATS.

The bottom line: Einride needed a reliable test provider that would help them screen qualified applicants quickly and efficiently without compromising on quality. They also needed a “plug-and-play” option to ensure the coding tests were compatible with major tools.

How Einride interviewed top engineering interns using Alva’s coding tests 

Einride considered several different coding platforms to automate their interview process before landing on Alva’s coding tests.

  "Alva's real-world coding tests resonated with us because we got everything we needed to do a real-world technical assessment, and it seamlessly integrated with the tools we already used."'

"Alva’s real-world coding tests resonated with us because we got everything we needed to do a real-world technical assessment, and it seamlessly integrated with the tools we already used."

One challenge they needed to address was to report the results of their Go-based auto-tests back to Teamtailor, which we helped set up.

After finishing up the setup in a few days, it was finally time to invite candidates.

The result: Hundreds of developers got to experience the types of engineering challenges Einride was dealing with by completing Alva’s coding tests. From the hiring side, Einride was able to quickly sift through the applications and pick out the most promising candidates that stood out.


Separating the great from the good

From hundreds of applicants down to the ten best submissions, Einride identified the top engineering candidates who received the desired offer.

The best part is, Einride’s developers didn’t have to spend a single hour on the screening process-it was all automated.

 ' "Alva enabled us to automate our interview process and scale it from 10s of candidates to 100s of candidates while still keeping it grounded in solving real-world, practical problems."'