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Online Assessments — What Each Company's OA Actually Involves

What an OA is

An online assessment — usually shortened to OA — is the stage between applying and speaking to anyone. You get a link, a timer, and a set of problems, and a threshold decides whether a human ever reads your application. It exists because large employers receive far more applicants than they have interviewer hours.

The confusing part is that 'OA' describes at least four different things. It can be a timed algorithmic test, a recorded video interview with no interviewer, a situational-judgement questionnaire, or a live pairing session with a real engineer. Advice written about one of those is actively misleading about the others, which is why generic OA preparation so often misses.

Who runs it matters

Most companies do not build their own. They configure a vendor — Karat, HireVue, CodeSignal, HackerRank, CoderPad — and the vendor determines the format far more than the employer's brand does. Two companies on the same platform give you a more similar experience than two teams at the same company on different platforms.

So the useful question is not 'what is Company X's interview like' but 'which platform runs Company X's first stage, and what does that platform reward'. The pages below answer both.

Three things true of nearly every OA

The invitation email is authoritative and the internet is not. Duration, section count, retake policy and whether the session is monitored are all employer settings rather than platform defaults. Two candidates sitting the same vendor's assessment for different companies can face materially different rules, so a forum post from last year describes that person's configuration, not yours.

The first attempt is usually the only one. Most employers enforce a cooling-off period — commonly six to twelve months — before you can sit the same assessment again. That makes an OA unusual among interview stages: there is no recovering next round from a bad sitting, because there is no next round.

The threshold is a filter, not a ranking. Most companies set a score bar and pass everyone above it rather than sorting candidates continuously. Clearing the bar comfortably is worth as much as clearing it spectacularly, which is an argument for finishing every section rather than perfecting the first one.

What preparation actually transfers

Very little general problem-solving practice helps with a recorded video stage, and no amount of rehearsed answers helps with a timed debugging section. Find out which shape you are facing first — that is what these pages are for — and then practise that shape specifically. The most common way a strong candidate underperforms an OA is preparing thoroughly for the wrong format.

By company

• Amazon — internal assessment platform, HireVue for some roles
• Google — internal loop (no third-party)
• Meta — Karat, internal loop
• Microsoft — internal loop, CodeSignal for some roles
• Salesforce — HireVue, CodeSignal, HackerRank

By platform

• HackerRank — HackerRank
• CodeSignal — CodeSignal
• Karat — Karat
• HireVue — HireVue
• CoderPad — CoderPad