Contents
Key Takeaways
Communication is one of the strongest predictors of developer success, influencing collaboration, problem-solving, project velocity, and client satisfaction.
Resumes and casual conversations don’t reveal communication skill, making structured evaluation essential before hiring.
The best assessment methods include code review discussions, pair-programming, requirement-clarification exercises, and async communication tests, all mirroring real work.
Great communicators show clarity, context, curiosity, and ownership, not just fluent speech—they ask good questions, articulate tradeoffs, and explain reasoning.
Evaluating communication early prevents misalignment, rework, and friction, improving long-term team performance and client outcomes.
With our engineering background from conducting over 500 tech interviews globally, we've learned that a developer's resume tells you nothing about their most critical skill: communication. The key is to test for this before you ever speak to them.
We use 3 tried-and-tested techniques to filter candidates early: ask them an open-ended question, have them submit a 2-minute cover video (more details below), and ask them to solve a small task and explain their solution.
This approach saves countless hours by weeding out candidates who are technically brilliant but collaboratively toxic.
The 3 Tried-and-Tested Techniques to Assess Communication
Technical skill alone doesn't build great software; collaborative teams do. The problem is, most hiring processes treat communication as an afterthought, something you might touch on in a final interview.
This is a fundamentally broken approach. Why waste hours interviewing someone who can code in a silo but can't explain a trade-off or work with a teammate? You have to invert the funnel and test for communication from the very beginning.
A good rule of thumb is to incorporate these 3 techniques in your screening round itself, so you only talk to the candidates worth interviewing and spending your time on.
An analysis of over 100,000 technical interviews found a candidate's communication ability was a strong predictor of whether they'd advance.
You can check out the full interviewing.io study here. The whole point is to only spend valuable interview time on candidates who have already proven they can do more than just code.
1. Ask Them an Open-Ended Question and Watch Their Thought Process
First, start with a simple filter: an open-ended question that forces them to explain their thought process. Skip the yes/no questions and trivia. You want to see how they structure their thoughts, justify decisions, and articulate complex ideas. This simple step reveals far more than a resume ever could.
2. Ask Them to Submit a 2-Minute Video Submission
Next up, ask for a quick video. This is an incredibly powerful way to see if a developer can translate complex ideas for a non-technical audience. It also gives you a glimpse into their confidence, clarity, and ability to structure an argument under a time constraint. It's a low-effort, high-signal assessment that costs you almost nothing.
3. Ask Them to Solve a Problem/Task End-to-End and See How They Explain It
Finally, the most powerful filter is a small, real-world task. This isn't just another coding challenge. The magic is in requiring a written or verbal explanation of their work. The code is only half the story; the write-up is the other. It shows you if they can document their work, a critical skill for any team.
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Practical Examples of How to Do It in Your Pre-Interview Rounds
It’s easy to talk about wanting great communication skills, but how do you actually test for them? Let's get practical. Here are a few battle-tested techniques you can build into your hiring process right now to see how a candidate really communicates.
These aren’t abstract puzzles. They’re designed to simulate the day-to-day realities of a software engineering role, giving you hard evidence of a candidate's communication style before you ever jump on a call. This data is far more telling than anything on a resume.
The Open-Ended Question Prompt
Here's a prompt I've seen work wonders:
"Walk me through a complex technical decision you made on a past project. What were the trade-offs you considered, what was the outcome, and what would you do differently now?"
A single question like this reveals so much. Can they articulate technical debt? Do they understand business constraints? Can they reflect on their own work? These are all hallmarks of a strong communicator. Make sure you're consistent in taking effective interview notes to compare candidates fairly.
The Two-Minute Video Submission Prompt
A simple prompt is all you need:
"Please record a two-minute video explaining the architecture of a recent project you worked on as if you were presenting it to a non-technical stakeholder (like a product manager or CEO)."
This tiny request immediately separates the developers who can share ideas from those who can only write code. It is an excellent filter.
The End-to-End Task with Explanation Prompt
This is exactly the philosophy behind Utkrusht’s proof-of-skill assessments, which focus on real work, not puzzles.
Try a task like this:
"Here is a small buggy function. Please fix the bug, refactor the code for better readability, and provide a brief write-up (max 200 words) explaining the changes you made and why."
This forces them to demonstrate not just their coding ability but their ability to communicate their decisions clearly and concisely.
The Pre-Interview Filter That Saves 80% of Your Time (And Sanity)
Why do these pre-interview filters work so well? Because they shift the evaluation from claims on a resume to proof of skill. Instead of taking a candidate's word that they're a "great communicator," you see it in action. This one change fundamentally de-risks your hiring process and saves an incredible amount of time.
By implementing these three checks at the very top of your hiring funnel, you create a powerful filter. You stop wasting hours on phone screens and initial interviews with candidates who were never going to be a good fit.
This workflow shows how these filters stack on top of each other, weeding out candidates before you spend precious interview time.
You only engage with a smaller, more qualified pool of candidates who have already demonstrated both technical competence and the communication skills needed to succeed on your team. We've seen this approach cut down the time-to-hire by focusing efforts where they matter most. This pre-interview filter is your best defense against a bad hire. You can get more ideas for refining your overall strategy in our guide on how to hire software engineers.
Developer Red Flags vs Green Flags (From 500+ Interviews)
Spotting strong communication isn't magic; it's a skill you build after sitting through hundreds of interviews. You start seeing the subtle cues that separate a collaborative asset from a future bottleneck. It’s less about what they say and more about how they say it.
Miscommunication is a notorious project killer. It's a shocking statistic, but studies show that approximately 70% of software projects fail due to communication breakdowns. This is exactly why this skill is non-negotiable.
The trick is to spot these behaviors early, ideally during pre-interview screening, so you don't waste a full interview loop on a candidate who will slow your team down.
Here's a quick rundown of the signals I've learned to watch for, both good and bad.
Communication Red Flags to Watch For
A communication red flag isn't just about bad grammar. It's about a mindset that actively damages collaboration. These candidates often create more work for everyone else because their thought process is a total black box.
Keep an eye out for these warning signs:
Vague or Evasive Answers: You ask for specifics on a tough technical challenge, and they give you hand-wavy generalities. This usually means they either don't know the details or just can't articulate them.
Jargon without Explanation: They throw around complex acronyms and deep technical terms, assuming everyone shares their exact context. It's a classic sign of poor audience awareness.
Failure to Ask Clarifying Questions: They hear a problem and immediately dive in headfirst without confirming a single assumption. This is how you end up with engineers wasting days building the wrong feature.
Defensiveness When Questioned: You poke a small hole in their logic, and they immediately get defensive instead of engaging in a healthy debate. This signals a resistance to feedback and will be toxic in code reviews.
These traits might seem minor in an interview, but they explode into major problems on a real team. We've seen firsthand how focusing on proof-of-skill helps companies sidestep these hires, a story you can see repeated in our customer case studies.
Communication Green Flags to Prioritize
On the flip side, great communicators are force multipliers. They make everyone around them better by cutting through ambiguity, speeding up problem-solving, and just generally making the work environment more collaborative.
Here’s what you should be looking for:
Thinking Out Loud: They narrate their thought process as they tackle a problem. This kind of transparency is gold for pair programming and code reviews.
Breaking Down Complexity: They can explain a complex system or algorithm using simple terms and analogies. This shows they don't just know it—they understand it.
Active Listening: They listen carefully to your questions, pause to think, and address every part of the prompt. They make sure they understand before jumping to a response.
Proactive Clarification: They ask smart questions to narrow the scope and confirm requirements. Things like, "What are the performance constraints for this feature?" or "Who is the end-user for this tool?"
A candidate who can articulate their trade-offs, admit what they don't know, and structure their thoughts logically is worth far more than one who just knows the right answer to a textbook algorithm question. These green flags are the clearest indicators of on-the-job success.
Common mistakes when interviewing developers
Let's be honest: a lot of engineering leaders are running hiring processes that reward the wrong skills. You optimize for how fast a candidate solves a puzzle but completely miss their inability to explain how they solved it. It’s a classic trap. You end up with poor communicators who slip through the cracks, only to cause friction and delays once they’re on your team.
The real issue is that traditional technical interviews measure performance under artificial pressure. They don't test for the collaborative skills needed to actually build software with a team. This is a massive oversight, especially when communication is now the #1 most requested soft skill in tech job postings, based on an analysis of nearly two million ads.
So, companies say they want communicators, but their hiring practices are designed to hide them. Here's where it goes wrong.
Focusing on Algorithm Speed over Solution Clarity
One of the biggest mistakes I see is over-indexing on the speed of a coding solution. A candidate might crush a LeetCode problem in record time, but what have you really learned if they can't articulate their thought process? Or the trade-offs they made? Or how it would integrate into a larger system?
You've learned they're good at competitive programming. That's it. A fast but incomprehensible solution is a liability, not an asset, in a team setting.
Instead of just checking if the code runs, try shifting the focus. A simple trick is to ask the candidate to add comments to their code as if they were handing it off to a junior developer. This tiny change forces them to demonstrate empathy and clarity—far better predictors of success than raw algorithm speed.
Asking Abstract Brain Teasers
Another classic misstep is leaning on abstract brain teasers. "How many golf balls fit in a school bus?" might be a fun distraction, but it tells you absolutely nothing about a developer's ability to debug a failing API or discuss architecture with a product manager.
These questions test for a specific type of cleverness that rarely correlates with engineering performance. Good communication is about clarity and context, not abstract riddles. Falling for this is just one of the many common early hiring mistakes that can derail a growing team.
The goal isn't to hire the cleverest person in the room. It's to hire the person who makes everyone else in the room more effective. That comes from clear, concise communication—something brain teasers completely ignore.
Quick 5-question checklist -- are you doing these right things to predict developer job performance before you hire?
Overhauling your entire hiring process feels like a massive project. But sometimes, just asking a few sharp questions is enough to see where the cracks are. This isn't about adding more steps; it's about making the existing ones smarter.
I put together this quick checklist to help you gut-check whether your current methods are actually finding great communicators or just good coders. The goal is to shift from hiring based on a resume to hiring based on real, observable skills.
Run through these five questions with your hiring team. They're designed to reveal immediate opportunities for improvement in how you predict on-the-job performance.
Question | Why It Matters | Simple Action to Improve |
|---|---|---|
1. Does my assessment mirror a real task? | Abstract puzzles don't show how someone solves real-world problems. You need to see them work on tasks they'll actually face on the job. | Replace one abstract coding challenge with a small bug fix or feature extension task based on a real, simplified problem your team has solved. |
2. Am I evaluating the explanation, not just the code? | A correct solution that nobody else can understand is a huge liability. Good code is maintainable and well-documented. | Make a "written explanation of your approach" a mandatory, graded component of every take-home assessment. |
3. Does my process filter for communication early? | Waiting until the final interview to discover a candidate is a poor communicator wastes dozens of hours of your team's time. | Add a single, open-ended written question or a 2-min video submission to your initial application form. |
4. Am I creating an environment for dialogue? | Interrogations test memory under pressure. Conversations test collaboration, problem-solving, and teamwork. | Instruct your interviewers to start their technical sessions with: "Treat me like a colleague. Ask me questions, and let's solve this together." |
5. Do I have objective criteria for communication? | "Good communicator" is subjective and prone to bias. Without a rubric, you can't evaluate candidates fairly or consistently. | Create a simple 3-point scorecard for interviews: (1) Asked clarifying questions, (2) Articulated trade-offs, (3) Explained their final solution clearly. |
These simple checks can dramatically improve your hiring accuracy. A core principle of proof-of-work based hiring—you get to see how a candidate actually approaches the problems they’ll be paid to solve. You can learn more about this powerful method by exploring what is proof-of-work based hiring and why it’s so much better at predicting performance.
Stop guessing how developers will collaborate once hired.
With Utkrusht, evaluate communication through practical scenarios that mirror real teamwork. Get started now and build smoother, stronger engineering teams.
Founder, Utkrusht AI
Ex. Euler Motors, Oracle, Microsoft. 12+ years as Engineering Leader, 500+ interviews taken across US, Europe, and India
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