Are HackerRank & CodeSignal still relevant for coding interviews?
Short answer: yes, both are still very much in use, but the honest answer has more nuance than that, because what they’re actually being used for has shifted noticeably since AI coding assistants became something every candidate has open in a second tab.
If you’re prepping right now, the useful question isn’t whether these platforms still exist, since they clearly do. It’s what they’re actually testing for today, where they sit in a modern hiring pipeline, and whether either one still tells an employer something an AI-assisted candidate can’t fake.
What each platform is actually good at right now
HackerRank has leaned into scale. It remains the most complete platform for teams running high interview volume, largely because of its role-specific question libraries and the broadest applicant tracking system integration in the category, with more than 30 connectors including Workday and iCIMS. Goldman Sachs currently tells engineering applicants directly to expect a HackerRank assessment. Rather than fight the reality that candidates use AI tools, HackerRank has pivoted toward testing “human plus AI” skills directly, evaluating how a candidate works alongside an assistant instead of pretending the assistant isn’t there.
CodeSignal has gone a different direction. Its differentiator is the Coding Score, a standardized, proctored assessment that produces a portable result candidates can reuse across employers, which has made it popular with large companies fielding thousands of applications who want a trusted third-party screening layer. It’s also expanded well beyond pure coding, adding business, agentic, and behavioral assessment types, along with AI-driven interview agents for non-engineering roles. Robinhood, Brex, and monday.com have public evidence connecting them to the platform.
The honest limitation neither platform has fully solved
Here’s the part most comparison articles skip over. Neither platform is fully resistant to AI assistance. A candidate running an AI coding assistant on a second device can still get through a meaningful share of question types on either platform, since the sandbox only controls what happens inside the browser, not what’s happening on a second screen. CodeSignal says this plainly in its own documentation: desktop AI assistants operate outside the browser sandbox and the platform has no technical means to detect them.
Get Fahim ul Haq’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
That limitation has produced a real, pointed critique from newer competitors built specifically around this gap. One assessment vendor put it bluntly: if a standardized coding score no longer separates candidates who all finish the assessment with an AI agent’s help, the score has stopped doing the one job it existed to do. That’s not a knock on HackerRank or CodeSignal’s engineering, both are well-built platforms with mature integrations and large customer bases. It’s a genuine structural question about what a sandboxed coding test can still measure once most serious candidates have an assistant open by default.
How this fits into the rest of the pipeline
The practical picture in 2026 looks like a split. HackerRank, CodeSignal, and Codility still dominate the earliest stage of the funnel, the online assessment that filters a large applicant pool down to a manageable number before anyone talks to a human. I’ve written in detail about what that stage actually tests in the Amazon OA cheat sheet, which runs on exactly this kind of silent, hidden-test-case platform.
Once a candidate clears that gate, the live coding round increasingly happens somewhere else entirely. Companies running AI-enabled interviews, Meta among the most visible examples, have moved toward CoderPad specifically because a live, conversational round with an interviewer present tests something the async OA never could: whether the candidate can actually explain, defend, and modify the code an assistant produced. That’s a different skill from anything a HackerRank or CodeSignal OA is built to measure, and it’s exactly the gap those platforms’ AI-resistance problem creates.
What this means for how you prepare
Given all of that, a few things are worth doing differently depending on which stage you’re actually facing.
- For the OA stage on HackerRank, CodeSignal, or Codility, treat it like the silent, hidden-test-case gate it actually is. Getting your fundamentals genuinely solid matters more here than anywhere else in the process, since there’s no interviewer to catch a wrong assumption for you. Grokking the Coding Interview is built around recognizing the recurring patterns these platforms draw their question banks from.
- For the live, AI-enabled round that often follows, the skill being tested has moved to validation and explanation, not raw output. Rehearsing that format specifically, out loud, under time pressure, matters more than grinding more OA-style problems. mockinterviews.dev is built for practicing exactly that dynamic.
- If you’re tracking your own recurring misses across practice problems on either platform, whether that’s a pattern you keep getting wrong or a specific edge case that trips you up, Fenzo can turn that log into a structured set of drills built around your actual gaps, rather than a generic list of problems you’ve already half-memorized.
- Don’t assume the platform name in your invitation tells you the whole story. The same company can run different platforms for different roles, regions, or hiring cycles, so confirm the specifics in your own invitation rather than assuming another candidate’s experience applies to you.
So, still relevant, just not the whole story anymore
HackerRank and CodeSignal haven’t gone anywhere, and for the specific job of filtering a large applicant pool efficiently, they’re still doing exactly what they were built to do. What’s changed is that passing one of these assessments no longer means what it used to mean. It’s evidence you can produce correct output under a sandbox’s constraints, not evidence you can reason clearly about code the way the rounds that follow now require. Treat the OA as the gate it still genuinely is, and save your deeper preparation for the part of the process that’s actually testing judgment.
