SQL assessment test on a real database_
Candidates for data and backend roles solve realistic SQL tasks against a database in Codility Screen. Your talent team sees a scored result for each candidate before an engineer spends time on the first interview.
verifiedEvery task is designed by assessment engineers and reviewed by occupational psychologists.
Task 1
PostgreSQL
Codility is a G2 Leader in Technical Skills Screening, rated 4.6 out of 5 from verified customer reviews.
Today’s failing approach: SQL quizzes, take-home tasks, engineer phone screens and a test per team
Multiple-choice quizzes
A multiple-choice SQL quiz asks candidates to pick the right answer from a list. A candidate can recognize a correct query without being able to write one. Candidates who pass the quiz can then fail basic SQL questions in the technical interview with your engineers.
In-house take-home tasks
Your engineers write the schema, the sample data and the questions, then mark each submission by hand. A candidate can also paste the task into an AI chat tool and submit the generated query. The submission does not show whether the candidate wrote the query.
Engineer phone screens
Your engineers spend interview time asking SQL questions that a screening task could answer. Each interviewer asks different questions at a different level of difficulty. As a result, candidates for the same role do not solve the same task.
A different test for every team
Each hiring manager runs a separate SQL test, or none at all. Your talent team cannot compare results across teams or regions.
Run one SQL assessment test for hiring per data role
Codility Screen is a technical assessment platform for the screening stage of hiring. You can use Codility Screen for roles that use SQL, including data analysts, data engineers, analytics engineers and backend developers. Every candidate for a role solves the same SQL tasks. Your talent team then builds the shortlist for each role from the scored results.
Choose SQL tasks that match each data role
You can choose the tasks for each role from Codility’s task library. A data engineer assessment can combine SQL tasks with a Python task. A data analyst assessment can use SQL tasks only.
Where a role needs a custom task, your engineers can use Build with MCP. An engineer describes the task to an AI coding assistant such as Claude, Cursor or GitHub Copilot. The assistant then builds the task and its test cases. The engineer reviews the task before publishing it.
Score every candidate’s SQL by the same rules
Codility scores the output of each candidate’s queries for correctness. Codility’s scoring is deterministic. The same output always earns the same score. There is no manual marking for automatically scored SQL tasks.
You set the cut score, the minimum overall score that your team expects for the role. Your talent team then sees which candidates reached the cut score.
Codility connects with applicant tracking systems (ATS), including Greenhouse, Lever, Workday and SmartRecruiters. Codility stores each result in the candidate’s ATS record.
Review each candidate’s queries before the interview
Codility stores the queries that each candidate submitted with the score for each task. Your engineers can read the SQL to see how each candidate thinks through the task before they decide who to interview.
Codility can also collect integrity signals, which give reviewers evidence about how the candidate produced each query. The signals include paste events and identity verification.
You decide whether candidates can use the AI Assistant in each assessment. Where the AI Assistant is enabled, every candidate interaction is captured as reviewable AI activity.
Questions about SQL assessment tests
What is a SQL assessment test?
A SQL assessment test is a pre-employment assessment that checks whether a candidate can write SQL for the role. Some tests use multiple-choice questions. Other tests ask the candidate to write queries. Codility Screen uses the written-query format.